Eat the
Frog
You know the hard task is waiting. You answer a few emails first, make another coffee, straighten your desk. By the time you feel ready to face it, the afternoon has arrived and your focus is gone.
What is Eat the Frog?
Eat the Frog is a prioritization tool that has you do your hardest, most important task first thing in the day, before anything else. The frog is that one task you're most likely to put off and most likely to matter: the difficult phone call, the big assignment, the thing nagging at the back of your mind. You handle it first, while your energy and attention are at their highest and before the day's small demands crowd in. The name comes from a line often attributed to Mark Twain, that if you have to eat a frog, you should do it first thing so the worst of the day is already behind you.
Your focus and willpower are strongest in the early hours and drain as interruptions pile up, so the hard task gets your best self when you do it first. There's a second payoff. An important task left undone follows you all day as low background dread, and finishing it early clears that weight, which makes everything after it feel lighter.
How to use it
Run your day through five steps. The decision the night before is what makes the morning work.
- The night before, name tomorrow's frog.
Choose the single most important and most-dreaded task, and write it down so there's no morning debate. - If you have two frogs, eat the ugliest first.
Start with the bigger, harder one while your energy is freshest. - Start on it first thing, before email and small tasks.
Protect the opening stretch of your morning for the frog and nothing else. - Stay on it until it's done or meaningfully advanced.
Resist slipping to easier tasks for the quick feeling of progress. - Then move on to the rest of your day.
With the frog gone, the smaller tasks fall into place far more easily.
Worked example
You've been dreading a billing dispute with your phone company that needs a long call you keep avoiding. Each morning you mean to deal with it, and each day it slides to tomorrow while you do easier things instead. So one evening you decide the call is tomorrow's frog and write it at the top of a sticky note.
The next morning you make the call at nine, before opening your inbox or making coffee. You sit through the hold music, explain the problem once, and have it resolved by twenty to ten. The rest of the day feels noticeably lighter, and you move through your other tasks faster, because the one thing you'd been dreading for a week is finally off your plate.