“If you only did the things you don’t want to do, you’d have everything you want.” – Mel Robbins , Stop Saying You’re Fine

First, I want to thank everyone who sent me their lovely birthday greetings and good wishes on my birthday last Friday!  I thoroughly enjoyed celebrating at The Happiest Place on Earth (AKA Disneyland) with my wonderful husband, Rick.  The weather was perfect and we even manifested an unusually small crowd for a summer day.

Because of my birthday and preparing my upcoming six-session “Prosperity Summer Camp” webinar to teach you step-by-step exactly how to create ANYTHING you want using the Law of Attraction, I did not have time to prepare an original blog for today.

However, because I needed some valuable material to share with you, the Law of Attraction (which says “energy attracts like energy”) guided me quickly and easily to a great post by WalktheTalk.com (which I have permission to reprint) about an important topic that has come up a lot lately among my coaching clients: How do you prioritize the many tasks and goals competing for your time to ensure you will accomplish the ones that really matter MOST to you?

The answer follows! I hope you will find it as helpful as I did.

“Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.   In Eat That Frog, author Brian Tracy says that your ‘frog’ should be the most difficult item on your to-do list because, if you eat that first, it’ll give you energy and momentum for the rest of the day.  But if you let the frog sit there on the plate and stare at it while you do a hundred unimportant things, it can drain your energy and you won’t even know it.  Your ability to select the most important task at the moment and get it done will have more of an impact on your success than any other quality or skill.” – WalktheTalk.com

“Apply the 80/20 Rule to Everything” from the book Eat That Frog! By Brian Tracy

“The 80/20 Rule is one of the most helpful of all concepts of time and life management.  It is also called the ‘Pareto Principle’ after its founder, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who first wrote about it in 1895.  Pareto noticed that people in his society seemed to divide naturally into what he called the ‘vital few,’ the top 20 percent in terms of money and influence, and the ‘trivial many,’ the bottom 80 percent.

He later discovered that virtually all economic activity was subject to this principle as well.  For example, this principle says that 20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of your results, 20 percent of your customers will account for 80 percent of your sales, 20 percent of your products or services will account for 80 percent of your profits, 20 percent of your tasks will account for 80 percent of the value of what you do, and so on.  This means that if you have a list of ten items to do, two of those items will turn out to be worth five or ten times more than the other eight items put together.

Number of Tasks versus Importance of Tasks

Here is an interesting discovery.  Each of the ten tasks may take the same amount of time to accomplish.  But one or two of those tasks will contribute five or ten times the value of any of the others.

Often, one item on a list of ten tasks that you have to do can be worth more than all the other nine items put together.  This task is invariably the frog that you should eat first.

Focus on Activities, not Accomplishments

The most valuable tasks that you can do each day are often the hardest and most complex.  But the payoff and rewards for completing these tasks efficiently can be tremendous.  For this reason, you must adamantly refuse to work on tasks in the bottom 80 percent while you still have tasks in the top 20 percent left to be done.

Before you begin work, always ask yourself, ‘Is this task in the top 20 percent of my activities or in the bottom 80 percent?’

The hardest part of any important task is getting started on it in the first place.  Once you actually begin work on a valuable task, you will be naturally motivated to continue.  A part of your mind loves to be busy working on significant tasks that can really make a difference.  Your job is to feed this part of your mind continually.

Motivate Yourself

Just thinking about starting and finishing an important task motivates you and helps you to overcome procrastination.  Time management is really life management, personal management.  It is really taking control of the sequence of events.  Time management is having control over what you do next.  And you are always free to choose the task that you will do next. Your ability to choose between the important and unimportant is the key determinant of your success in life and work.

Effective, productive people discipline themselves to start on the most important task that is before them. They force themselves to eat that frog, whatever it is.  As a result, they accomplish vastly more than the average person and are much happier as a result.  This should be your way of working as well.”

Thanks, Brian! Once again, he has proven that the most profound, impactful ideas are often the simplest! If you will just discipline yourself each day to identify and then plunge in and tackle your 20 percent most IMPORTANT tasks (also often known as “Income Producing Activities”) FIRST, you will inevitably create all the success, money, time freedom, happiness, fulfillment and self-esteem you could possibly want.

And once you realize that you really DO stand to gain ALL those goodies, then eating that ugly old frog doesn’t seem so daunting, now does it?

IMPORTANT NOTE: A Cup of Caroll is taking next week off for our USA Independence Day holiday weekend AND so that I can continue preparations for my Prosperity Summer Camp webinar.  On June 19, you should have received the first email letting you know that registration is now OPEN and Early Birds who register by June 30 will qualify for two additional VALUABLE gifts!  If you didn’t get it, watch for the next email about the course that comes out Monday the 26th and jump right in! The six-module Zoom course begins on Tuesday evening July 18. I promise it will be interactive, fun and create lots of new prosperity for all who join me. Your friends, family and Teammates are welcome to join the course.  Please pass my emails along to them and encourage them to sign up too! (If you or they have any questions, please email me right away.)

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