How To Stop Procrastinating

Check out the book, Eat That Frog! For Students, adapted from Brian Tracy’s time-management bestseller, Eat That Frog, which has sold more than 2.4 million copies around the world. 

This new edition addresses the specific needs of high school and college students, teaching them readily actionable time-management methods, techniques and strategies. Tracy, with Anna Leinberger also reveal 22 ways to stop procrastinating. 

You’ll read the details behind the three pillars required for a successful mindset:

1. Self-Esteem
2. Personal Responsibility
3. Goals

Plus, you’ll discover how to effectively:

• structure your own time.
• apply the 80/20 rule.
• study something you are not interested in.
• motivate yourself into action.
• practice creative procrastination.
• take back your time from enslaving technological addictions.

Recently, Tracy shared his answers to the following questions:

Question: What inspired you to write this new book for students?

Tracy: Like many good ideas, this book was born of a need we saw in our readers. Amazon and Goodreads reviews were full of parents saying they bought a copy for their kids to read, and readers wrote to us personally saying they wished they could get their children to use these tools. But the original book just isn’t a good fit for a student. It was written for someone who had a workday, a long stretch of 8 hours to divide up themselves. A student’s life is completely different. They have to be in class during the day, dividing homework time between short study halls or evenings and weekends. You need a completely different approach to time management. Beyond that, most of the examples in the book were from world of business. A student isn’t going to be convinced that a tool will work for them when the example given is someone who tripled their income- the student needs to know that a tool will help them get a better grade, or help them balance school, homework, and their job.

High school and college are the perfect time to learn these skills. This is when you are growing from a child, dependent on your parents and subject to their decisions, into an adult who is responsible for and gaining more control over your own life. This doesn’t happen by magic. We all have to learn how to take responsibility, how to make choices about our time and goals and lives. Ultimately, a student’s job is to learn. And the new book is all about learning how to learn, about taking your education into your own hands, and about tools that will help you succeed beyond your wildest dreams.

Question: What are the primary reasons students procrastinate? 

Tracy: Students procrastinate for the same reasons adults do! There are so many reasons, and we cover many of these challenges in the book- along with specific strategies to combat them. People often don’t recognize the real reason for their procrastination, they just beat themselves up for it. That doesn’t help anyone! Often, there is a rational reason for your avoidance. One example would be having a task where you don’t understand everything you need to in order to complete the assignment. In this case, you have to first realize that you are stuck because you don’t understand something (not because you’re lazy!), then identify what it is you don’t understand, and finally focus on learning the skill you are missing. If you do that, the procrastination will evaporate, and you will easily be able to complete your assignment.  

Question: Do you find procrastination is more of an issue for college freshmen or college seniors? 

Tracy: It would probably be too big a generalization to say. Hopefully seniors will have learned a thing or two about managing their own time since their freshman year, but a college freshman who has been taught excellent study skills might be better at time management than a senior who never benefited from that sort of instruction. And no matter what year of high school, college, or even graduate school a student is in, this book has tools that will teach you those time management skills even if no one has ever taught them to you. Most adults have not even learned great ways to manage their own time. If you use the tools from this book in high school or college, you will already be lightyears ahead of most other people around you. 

Question: Why do you believe your original book, Eat That Frog, has been so successful? 

Tracy: The original Eat that Frog! is successful for the simplest of reasons: it works. If you take the advice in the book and apply it to your own life, you will see drastic improvements in your productivity. I have been writing books and giving seminars and trainings for decades, and over that time I have seen first-hand how transformational these simple tools can be. They don’t take any special equipment or technology, and you can apply them to your life immediately. There is no greater value a book can give than the experience of trying something and seeing immediate results.

Thank you to the book's publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.