Eating a frog with a tomato

Picture taken from Victor Pace’s Pexels profile (highly recommend following him on Instagram and Pexels for more jaw-dropping photos)

Aspiring chefs! Take out your pencil and notebook and write this recipe down, the recipe on how to make a delicious dish of Frog pasta with tomato sauce…Wait…that sounds kind of gross…right? Well you’re in luck, as it isn’t a traditional recipe, but a secret sauce for effective time management.

Source of image: https://www.briantracy.com/blog/time-management/the-truth-about-frogs/

Essentially this technique is used to limit our bad habit of procrastination and be more focused on our tasks at hand.

So, how does one “eat a frog”? Well you eat it like you eat any other thing, piece by piece. Now you might be asking where does the tomato factor into all of this? Well the answer is in the “Pomodoro Technique” (Pomodoro meaning Tomato in Italian), named after a kitchen timer that looked like a tomato.

The pomodoro kitchen timer, source of image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique

Though it’s not a traditional food recipe, it does follow certain steps to get what you want, these steps are:

1. Decide on a task to be done
2. Break it into smaller, digestible tasks
3. Set the pomodoro timer (alarm) for 25 mins
4. Eliminate all distractions, and focus on the task for 25 mins
5. Once the timer is up, take a 3 to 5 min break, and give yourself a reward for completing the 25mins task without loosing focus
6. Then repeat the above 1 to 5 steps until the Frog has been completely eaten

Now on to my personal experience with the recipe.

I have been trying to get into the habit of reading more and more books, but I often find myself getting distracted by my phone after barely reading half a page. So I thought I’d use this activity to test the waters with this technique, either if it even works or not.

Realme has a pretty useful option for this activity, it’s called the “Focus Mode” and what it essentially does is silences all my notifications (except calls) for the amount of time I have set and plays a soothing music during the time.

So here I am, having limited all my distractions, set a timer and picked up Tolkien’s The Hobbit, I read the first couple of pages without any distractions, but then an inner voice suddenly became louder:

“Come on, just check your notifications; it won’t take more than a minute, you might be missing out on a lot of things, don’t you want to know what’s going on?”

Battling through the urges I was able to read around 20 or so pages in the spam of an hour before giving into the temptation of checking my phone. And that’s when I lost my time and gave into the monkey part of my brain that loves instant gratification.

Though I think I was able to achieve what I had sat out to do in the spam of the time, if I had a clear goal defined, like I’ll read X amounts of chapters, that, I think would’ve been a much easier goal to follow than I have to read more.

Overall found this technique to be pretty useful for time management and productivity, and I think I’ll be using it more frequently in the future for other, more complicated tasks as well.

Something that I will be adding to this, that I think will improve my overall efficiency with this method will be to make the reward I receive during the 3–5 min break more appealing, so the monkey part of my brain gets his share of instant gratification without completely taking over and leading me towards procrastination again.