Eat That Frog – Deborah Makarios

August 27, 2019

Grand Productivity Experiment: Conclusions

Time flies when you’re… experimenting on yourself.

It was nearly two and a half months ago that I wrote the introductory post of the Grand Productivity Experiment, resolving to Do Something about my general state of disorganization and unproductivity before it brought my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave.

(A note to those who haven’t been following this from the beginning: the introductory post outlines the first method tested. The Phase One post reports back on that and outlines the second method. And so forth.)

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July 9, 2019

Grand Productivity Experiment: Phase Three… Partially Indigestible

Here’s the thing about frogs: there is no shortage of them. Life is, in fact, frogs all the way down. But I must confess that some of the frogs I ate this last week in my Eat That Frog experiment didn’t go all the way down.

I had three problems with it. First: how do you know when you’ve eaten enough frogs for the day? If “there’s always a bigger fish” then logically there is also always a smaller fish, and therefore a smaller frog. When do you stop?
Second: if the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time, how many bites should you take out of an elephant-sized frog in one day? (And how big is a bite, anyway?)

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July 2, 2019July 2, 2019

Grand Productivity Experiment: Phase Two, Um… Over?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned this week, it’s that Unexpected Stuff Happens. Always a useful lesson, and one which we humans are surprisingly prone to forgetting, considering how often life provides reminders.

I thought this week’s productivity experiment – using the Master List and Daily Lists – would be a piece of cake. I’ve done similar things before, and they worked ok. Well, this week’s major events were certainly not something I had on my Master List. In fact, very little that happened this week was.

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