Comedians don’t eat frogs…

by webmaster on February 28, 2017

People have been eating frogs for hundreds of years, but comedians don’t eat frogs, though this is nothing to do with eating actual frogs.
Eat The Frog is actually about procrastination or advice on how not to procrastinate. It’s basically the advice that if you have loads of unpleasant things to do in a day, pick the worst one and do that first… eat the frog – the presumption being that eating frogs is unpleasant.
There is of course a completely reverse way to look at procrastination. Recently I’ve read articles saying that procrastination isn’t necessarily a bad thing; ones saying that actively procrastinating on the big thing (the frog) often can make you speed through all the other little things that also need to be done, or – and this is my favorite one – that you procrastinate for so long on something you can no longer remember why it was on the list. I have my own variation of this… if someone asks you to do something and you procrastinate for a bit, they may find an alternative way to get it done. I once worked in a place where our office was on the second floor and the photocopier was on the first, and my boss used to come in and ask me to photocopy something for him (I was very junior at the time), and I used to say I’ll get around to it but basically just leave it there and he’d eventually need it so would go and do it himself.
For creative people, procrastination is actually healthy. If you have a deadline and you leave the task right up until that deadline, it can often help you think more clearly – that’s what I call germination procrastination: it looks like you’re just leaving the task till the last available moment, but while you’re procrastinating, something in your sub-conscious is actually already working on it so that when you come to do it, it all just flows out.
This works brilliant for creativity tasks, like writing comedy. Okay, we get the idea in plenty of time, but we leave it until the very last minute to put our thoughts in order for the show that night – haven’t you ever noticed how many comedians are seen scribbling away furiously in the green room before a show? Comedians don’t eat frogs.

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