1 Frog and a Handful of Tadpoles

If you’ve read my blogs before you’ll know about my love of lists and of the time management system of ‘eating frogs’ but recently even I’ve found my solid advice and tried and tested practices have been unable to cope with the amount of work I have on.

The biggest problem was not the size of the list – I’ve always got a million things on – but the fact that were some massive frogs on there that I was rolling over week after week which was starting to mean that I had more frogs and less easy tasks – tadpoles if you like. That sense of overwhelm (and the fear it brought to me) meant that I was only even doing the easy things to try and keep on top of it all.

Let’s be honest readers, that way lies disaster of all kinds, so I knew had to change how I was approaching things and make inroads into some of those more challenging (at least in my head) tasks. So I sat back and thought about how I managed my time and about all the things I loved about how I worked and how my days usually panned out. From there I came up with plan and part of that plan was very different from how I usually did things – it was to look at the way I was speaking to myself.

Interestingly this came about from a talk I’d attended on overcoming imposter syndrome (yes, I do suffer sometimes, don’t we all! But that’s a topic for another blog). The speaker was teaching us how to flip the script on the way we spoke to ourselves – turning the ‘I can’t’ into ‘Why can’t I?’ so when I was reviewing my owns ways of working I had a think about how I was talking to myself when I was working through these mammoth lists each week and my overriding thoughts seemed to be:

“I’ve got so much to do”, “I’ll do lots more tomorrow”, “I’ll work some extra hours now to get ahead”

None of these seemed to be helping how I felt so I thought instead about when I felt really good about a day and I knew that that positivity lay in my achievements. That gave me an idea, my core list is still important- it’s everything I have going on that I needed to get sorted but what if I could break that down into more achievable sections? I started there, taking my big list and making a smaller daily list but I knew it would be easy to only add the quick win tadpoles to it so I set myself a couple of rules: Every list should always have 1 big frog on it, every list should then have a handful of tadpoles and every list should only have enough tasks to cover 2/3 of my working hours to allow for ad hoc tasks and fire-fighting. I then headed the list with something positive – I called it Achievements, so each day was Monday’s Achievements, Tuesday’s Achievements and so on.

I know it sounds like such a simple, small thing but knowing that I had already assured myself I was going to get everything done kind of made things better – I had reframed the overwhelm and made it, well, whelming! (Yes I know it’s not a word). I’ve been on this two weeks now and it’s been incredibly successful for me, I’ve cleared the list of the backlog of frogs that have been hanging around for ages… I feel amazing and I’m going to stick to it.

I can’t recommend this enough – cut down, get through and reframe how you’re labelling things for a rekindling that list love!