1-Sentence-Summary: Eat That Frog provides 21 techniques and strategies to stop procrastinating and get more done. Read in: 4 minutes Favorite quote from the author: After coming across a short review of this book yesterday, I added it to my library and thought I’d give it a go. At 71 years old, Brian Tracy has built a massive personal brand , mostly by writing dozens of books on personal development. Eat That Frog is his most popular one, and here are my 3 takeaways from the summary on Blinkist: Make use of your unproductive time. Know yourself. Make appointments with yourself. Are you with me? Let’s go! Lesson 1: Make use of your unproductive time. The summary said that . Holy moly! Even if you’re not driving, chances are you still spend quite some time commuting. (that’s one-way), which means we spend an entire year of our life going back and forth between work and home. That’s why Brian suggests to make use of this time, for example by listening to audio books, programs or languagetapes. Extend this idea, and you’ll soon find yourself taking notes while waiting in line, reading when you’re waiting for someone you’re meeting and learning Spanish while doing the dishes. Just like the commute, these little bits of learning add up, and amount to quite a lot. However, I’d like to take it one step further than Brian and say this: Eliminate recurring unproductive time altogether, wherever possible. , so if you can, move closer to your work, work from home, or try to get at least one home office day per week. Lesson 2: Know yourself. . The ancient Greek phrase has been attributed to many sources, but that doesn’t make it any less true. , meaning you know what you’re good at, and what you’re not good at. If you know that you can’t even walk with less than 7 hours of sleep, then . You don’t know how much sleep you need? . Related to this is your time of day where you’re most productive. Maybe you are super focused in the morning (), but some are night owls. Extend thisidea to all areas of your life, especially the ones that make your body function, like sleep, exercise and diet, and you’ll soon know all the basics you have to take care of to be productive. Feeling healthy and fit is one of the biggest determinants of your confidence, which will in turn . The summary says 95% of our emotions result from the way we talk to ourselves, so you better be nice to yourself. The book even talks about skills and knowing your special talent, which makes you valuable to others, so this idea will help you beyond productivity to lead a successful life. Lesson 3: Make appointments with yourself. In the time management section, Brian Tracy recommends blocking your time in chunks and putting it on the calendar. I can personally vouch for this, . For me, I block out time to write and time to each day. Here come’s the important part though: Use this to work on personal goals. Consider this story from , long-time business partner and friend of , the richest man on theplanet. Charlie made $20 as a young lawyer back in the day, and wondered who his most important client was. He decided it was himself, so he decided to “spend” $20 bucks each day and . Yes, he missed out on $20, but he now had 60 minutes each day to work on real estate deals, construction projects, i.e. the things that eventually made him a billionaire. So pick a passion project, mine right now is this very website, sell yourself an hour, and work on it a little bit every day. “Step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. But you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts…slug it out one inch at a time, day by day. At the end of the day – if you live long enough – most people get what they deserve.” Who said that? Charlie Munger. My personal take-aways At 6 blinks only, this summary is fairly thin. What’s more, all of the ideas and principles were old news to me, and I think will be for anyone who’s done their productivity homework. By now, multiple books havebeen written on each of the individual ideas, like , time management, or even further sub-categories like setting priorities (). However, back when this book was originally published in 2001, it was a gold mine of valuable tips. It’s still a great introductory read for newbies and additionally, I found the statistics and studies quoted in it very interesting – these were all new to me. I’d probably go straight for the book, especially since it’s only around 120 pages. What else can you learn from the blinks? How many adults work with written goals and how much more successful that makes them What to do with big goals Why to-do lists are great and how to rank your to-do’s with the ABCDE system The thing chefs do incredibly well, that will help you get organized What creative procrastination and posteriorities are Who your biggest obstacle is A great trick to figure out which of your tasks are actually important – or frogs in Brian’s jargon Who would I recommend the Eat That Frog summaryto? The 17 year old high schooler, who wants to learn the things school doesn’t teach, the 35 year old Mum, who hasn’t been told that her apple pie recipe might need a little cinnamon, and keeps doing it the same way, and anyone who has a commute. You might also like these summaries: