Don’t wait the right mood to do the task… Just do it!

How many times have you been in the situation where you still have a task to finish, but you keep delaying it because simply you don’t LIKE to do it, or because you’re “waiting for the right mood”. So you procrastinate hoping that one of 2 things happen: either the task will magically disappear or you will get the inspiration and the mood will suddenly appear..

Well to be honest with you, in my line of expertise, this is identified as a MAJOR time waster, and there’s no one who managed to explain it better than Brian Tracy in his book “Eat that Frog” and here’s a bit on how it goes:

Imagine that you have to eat a LIVING Frog on your desk, and of course since this task is so disgusting and “painful” to do, you would keep pushing it to the end of your todo list. But the reality is that you will keep thinking about it and how difficult it will be to do that task  even if you’re doing something else.

The Right thing to do is to EAT THAT FROG which is the task that you don’t like to do… And eat it as quickly as possible 🙂 . Then you’ll be confident that nothing would be as difficult or disgusting as this one.

My Tip to you this week is the following:

If you’re not in the Mood to do a task… DO IT ANYWAY… even if you have to do it while nagging.. or by feeling annoyed and disgusted… JUST DO IT!

Enjoy your Week 🙂 !

Image courtesy of anankkml /

Samer Chidiac




Increase your productivity in 30 seconds!

Most people look at Time Management as being a hard-to-learn discipline that is optionally added to their personal life or required to their professional life as they grow,  rather than being a skill that would help them benefit the most out of their life (whether personal or professional).

In this week’s tip, you will learn a simple trick on how to change the way you look at your To-Do items in order to dramatically increase your productivity  and the nice thing about it, is that each time you will apply this trick  won’t take more than 30 seconds!

Let’s not make things very complicated, if you just look at your to do list, you will find items that would probably look like this:

– Write a report
– Call X,Y,Z
– Bring ABC from the Supermarket
– Meet with X,Y,Z

and the list would go on, and the list above applies to the tasks that you know in advance, but what about the interruptions that happen WHILE you’re doing another task, let’s say when one of your staff knocks on your door and interrupts your meeting to ask you about something… How to deal with that?

The answer is simple, as of today the trick is to expand the To-Do list (whether planned or un-planned) to have 4 items associated to it:

  • Related to?
  • Time to Execute
  • Urgent / Important
  • Context

New To-Do Perspective

So when you view your next task, you need to ask yourself (and preferably write down the answers)

  • Why should I do the following task?: per example To which project this is related; most of the times we are faced with Tasks that does not add value to our core personal or professional objectives, and therefore you can simply ignore the task all together.
  • How Long will it take to execute: divide it in 15 minutes chunks, even if it takes less… Practice makes perfect in this 🙂 and the general rule is that if it can be done in less than 2-5 minutes, then you can finish it immediately.
  • When is the deadline for this: How urgent and Important this is? (is your friend’s Facebook status is about her new outfit or about her mother’s passing away??)
  • What’s the context: do you need to Drive somewhere to finish it? do you need to be in the office? do you need internet? is it a phone call?

Once you practice the above method, things will start getting done more and you will be able to easily manage your time, and take better decisions on how prioritize your tasks.

Have a great week!

Samer Chidiac

