I Ate a Frog

This week during a department meeting, the book Eat That Frog: 21 Days to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time, by Brian Tracy, was highlighted by one of our leaders. I’d heard of the book before but have yet to read it. The premise is the old saying that if you were to eat a live frog first thing in the morning, what could be worse? You’ve got the most unpleasant task over with. Basically, tackle your toughest tasks first when you have the most energy and get them out of the way.

Although I still find myself procrastinating at times, I have taken on this particular mindset on some things. I’ve realized the that feeling of getting it done is so much nicer than the feeling of putting off a task and have it haunt you until you tackle it. (By the way, I did order the book!)

So yesterday I sat down to a nice juicy frog and decided I was going to give Mint.com another try, which is an aggregate service by Intuit. I had set it up before to get all my financial accounts in order and in one place. It also provides your credit score and other helpful budgeting tools. I hadn’t really kept it up, so I had quite a few broken links to fix as passwords have changed as well as new accounts to add. For the next few hours, this resulted in my phone blowing up with security code after security code in order to get through the process. No complaints there as it’s all a part of the security, which I’m grateful for.

Except for one last account that I could not for the life of me connect with Mint. I chatted with tech support of said account after resetting my login and everything else I could think of. Cleared the cache, used the Incognito browser in Chrome, nothing worked. Those two accounts would not connect even after the tech confirmed everything was in place for an aggregate connection to Mint. It should have absolutely worked. A ticket was opened and I’m now to call back Monday if I’m still having the issue (assuming it might “index” over the weekend). Sigh. Well, I at least consumed most of that frog!

I still have two more frogs in the line up – getting my taxes done and finding a good financial advisor, which is why I wanted to get all my ducks (frogs) in a row and have all my information together. It took a good portion of my Saturday, but as I knew it would, it’s a great feeling to have everything accounted for and organized, and have that task out of the way.

I look forward to reading Eat That Frog and hopefully putting it into practice all of the time, instead of some of the time.

Ribbit!!