How often our days begin with the laundry list filled of uneven tasks. Some seem quickly done while others require more time and effort. Conventional wisdom suggests, get the little ones out of the way quickly to focus on the big ones. It’s a dice roll because sometimes what seemed like expeditious completion turns out to be onerous and disjointed. In such occasions the soon-to-be completed turns out to be lots of little, time consuming frogs.
While in the advertising business we had three inboxes: one for “must do now,” another for “after the must-do,” and the third for everything else. Ninety nine percent of the time, the everything else box was never attended and routinely sent to the circular file. Nobody cared. Nobody noticed. And the reason was that a massive amount of make-work minutia is generated by make-work people.
The not-noticed wisdom of this frog business is this: The biggest one is often big since it is the most important. Little frogs can come from little people and really don’t matter in the great scheme of human events. And if we focus on what doesn’t matter, the tasks that do matter, never get done. We can be nibbled to death by the ducks or eat the duck.
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