Excellence = good. Excellence + speed = great.

Mid-career (whoa, how business-y does that sound? mid-career), I took a breather from magazines and went to work for the biggest, baddest beauty company in the world.

Such a serious place. Incredibly buttoned down. After years of professionally flitting around Gotham all day, going to this, that and the other beauty event, to breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner, I had to sit in my chair in my beautiful office and f-o-c-u-s.

Yes, I got to go to Paris a lot. But then I’d be sitting in my glamorous Paris boss’s beautiful office, f-o-c-u-s-i-n-g.

Though I worked really hard at my magazine job, there was tons of leeway with how I produced my pages every month. If I wanted to flit about all week and then come into work on a Sunday and write and edit like a crazed banshee, I could do that.

But the big, bad beauty company wasn’t down with loosey-goosey work habits like that. So I literally had to train myself to produce in a completely different way.

And I did.

Mostly with the help of one of my all-time fave productivity books: Eat That Frog.

The big “takeaway” from Eat That Frog is this: We all know which task we have to do on a given day that’s most important – and, typically – most terrifying.

And because we’re terrified at the amount of hard work and effort said Most Important Task will take, we often do everything else but our Most Important Task. We read email, organize files, gossip with our co-workers about the hottie in cubicle 9.

The author calls our Most Important Tasks “frogs.” And his reco is to eat your frog first thing in the morning, before doing anything else.

He also advocates working quickly. That, he says, is the killer combo. Not just mere excellence. But excellence and speed.

I have now arrived at the point in this blog post in which I will apply this frog-eating theorem to my current professional sitch.

I’ve committed to working full-time, four days a week, from home. The fifth day, theoretically, is for other projects, like another website I’m dying to develop.

But because I’ve been inefficient, time-wise, my four days has been dribbling into five. Which means my other projects have been dribbling into the weekend.

Weekend work-dribbling isn’t good.

Weekend work-dribbling is the exact opposite of good.

So I thought long and hard about what I was and wasn’t doing, and here’s what my detective work revealed:

The Wee Lass has fallen in love with early drop-off, because it means an extra half-hour of giggling with her gal pals before school starts. So I’m kissing her goodbye by 8 in the morning.

But then I’d head up the street to the newsstand to nab the New York Post and whatever else caught my eye – mostly shelter mags lately, especially Arch Digest, j’adoring Arch Digest. Then I would come back home, crack open my reading and drink tons of half-caf.

And then start my work.

But finally it dawned on me that I wasn’t maximizing my peak productivity hours. I am a straight-up morning person. I wake up super-duper early and my mind is on fire. Consequently, I’m useless later in the day. And my DVR queue is filled to the rafters with shows that start after 9 pm.

So this week, every day, I’ve been coming right back to the house after early drop-off and heading straight upstairs to my office, fruit in hand.

And along with my chunks of pineapple and cantaloupe, I’ve been eating my biggest, scariest Frog of the Day. After that, I eat the smaller frogs. One after the other.

Now, quite happily, because I buckled down, today is completely mine to do with whatever I please. All this week’s frogs have been eaten. TGIF.

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