Whether you are just starting your business or have been growing it for years you will get some use out of the skills described in Brian Tracy's book Eat That Frog. In this three-part series of articles, we will provide brief summaries of nine of the skills in the book, along with tips for putting them to use to make your daily work more effective. Here are the first three skills in the series.

1. Make a list of your goals.

At the end of each day, make a list of all the tasks you want to accomplish the next day. Do this before you take off your “work hat” and start winding down for the night, while those goals are still fresh in your mind.

Goals can seem intimidating when they're all swirling around up in your head. It can feel like you have dozens of them, when in reality, you might only have six or seven tasks to accomplish tomorrow. Putting those goals on paper will make you see them for what they really are: items on a short little list of things to be checked off.

Plus, writing down your goals frees up a lot of space in your brain for thinking and for relaxing, so you will get a good night's sleep and emerge ready to face the day ahead.

2. Arrange your goals in order of impact.

One of the most important ideas in Eat That Frog is that 80 percent of your results come from just 20 percent of your efforts. That's why you need to arrange your daily goals by order of importance, and focus your time and resources on that 20 percent that's going to make a real difference.

As Brian Tracy says in the book, “Before you begin work, always ask yourself, 'Is this task in the top 20 percent of my activities or in the bottom 80 percent?” If your business burned to the ground today and you had to start completely from scratch, would you choose to do that activity? If you are answering “no,” then that activity is not part of your top 20 percent.

Delegate or eliminate activities that aren't in the top 20 percent and focus on the ones that will produce results.

3. Eat your frogs first.

The title Eat That Frog comes from the idea of “eating your frogs for breakfast”; doing the hard things first. Your “frog” is your most intimidating, most important task of the day, the one you want to put off. “It is also,” Brian Tracy says in the book, “the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at the moment.”

Bring your complete focus and energy to it, and you will usually find you can finish it more quickly than you thought. Once that task is done, everything else will be downhill; the rest of your task list will roll by, because you have already eaten your frog for the day.

Eating frogs is a discipline, and it has to start with your own decision to tackle the hard things right away, as well as a determination to see them through.

You will learn about a lot more time management skills like these in Brian Tracy's book Eat That Frog and in the next two articles in this series.