System Review: Eat that Frog

Eat that Frog by Brian Tracy

Review by Laura

How does this system work?

The idea of ‘eating the frog’ is to clear out the most difficult thing on your list first, so that you don’t keep procrastinating on it. While it’s not something that usually works for me, as I’m the sort of person who needs to warm up my brain in the morning before tackling anything difficult, I picked up the book prepared to give it a try.

What I found was that this book isn’t so much of a system as a collection of basic productivity advice. Each chapter ends with a question box, to help you think about what you’ve done, what you’re doing, and how you might do it better in future. Like a lot of productivity books, I found it talked abut concepts without explaining them, using a lot of buzzwords and jargon, but not really digging into what that looks like in practice. Advice is given as though it's easy to follow, whereas for most of us, we know what we're supposed to be doing. The trouble is knuckling down and doing it!

The ‘chapter by chapter’ nature of it also meant that the advice felt fragmented, and I didn’t feel there was much flow between them. Some of the chapters are just 3 pages long, which in big print, doesn’t give you much to read!

What was its best feature?

The question boxes. You could probably give yourself a pretty good life overhaul just going through those, even if you didn’t actually read the book.

What was its worst feature?

The sweeping generalisations and the superficial nature of the advice.

Who would you recommend this system to?

Someone who feels completely overwhelmed by life and has never tried to get themselves organised. Sometimes, you just need something to walk you through the concepts and language, and give you just some baby steps to begin with.

Any other thoughts?

Despite the claims, I didn’t feel this was a revolutionary book. It felt like it recycled a lot of ideas from elsewhere, and I like to have more sources in my books to provide evidence. However, if you’re someone who’s feeling very anxious and inadequate about the state of your work/studies/life, I think this is a good reminder that there are simple, easy things you can do to put things in order again.