Eat the frog: what it means and how to make it work

"Eat the frog" means doing your most important and most dreaded task first thing in the workday, before email, chat or anything easier. Get the worst of it done early, and the task you were most likely to put off can't be put off, while everything after it feels lighter.

It needs no app and no system, which is part of its appeal. It also fails in predictable ways, mostly when the frog is badly chosen or the morning isn't really yours to spend.

What does eat the frog mean?

The time management writer Brian Tracy turned an old saying into a method in his book Eat That Frog. In his version, your frog is the biggest, most important task on your list, and usually the one you are most likely to procrastinate on. He adds two rules of thumb, roughly:

• If you have two frogs, eat the uglier one first. Start with the hardest of the important tasks, not the easiest.
• Don't sit and stare at it. The longer you look at the frog, the worse it gets. Start before you have time to talk yourself out of it.

So a frog is not just any unpleasant chore. Clearing out your Downloads folder is dull, but it doesn't matter much. A frog is the task that would move your work forward the most and that you keep finding reasons not to start: the awkward email to a client, the first draft of the proposal, the bug nobody understands.

Did Mark Twain say it?

Probably not. The line usually credited to him goes something like this: if you have to eat a live frog, do it first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day. Nobody has found solid evidence that Twain said or wrote it, which is true of a lot of lines with his name on them. The image stuck anyway, because it is vivid and slightly revolting, which is exactly how a dreaded task feels.

Why does doing the hardest task first work?

There isn't much direct research on eating the frog as a named method. What it rests on is fairly ordinary, and fairly sound.

• Dread takes up room. A task you are avoiding hums in the background all day. Finishing it early clears that weight before it grows.
• Mornings are often quieter. For many people the first hour or two at the desk bring fewer meetings and messages than the afternoon. Hard work needs that kind of stretch.
• Starting is the hard part. Most avoided tasks are less bad once you are ten minutes in. Doing it first means you start before the day hands you better excuses.
• It sets the order. Without a decision, the inbox decides what comes first, and the inbox rarely picks the frog.

None of this says the morning is magic. It says the frog deserves your best, least interrupted stretch of the day, and for a lot of people that stretch comes early.

How do you choose your frog?

The method lives or dies on the choice. Run each candidate through these tests.

1. It matters. Ask which task, if it were done by tonight, would make the biggest difference to your week.
2. You have been avoiding it. If you would happily do it anyway, it is not a frog, it is just work. The frog is the one that keeps sliding to tomorrow.
3. It fits in a morning. "Write the report" is too big. "Write the first two sections of the report" can be done by lunch. If the frog is a whole project, eat the first bite.
4. The first step is obvious. Write down the very first physical action: open the file and rewrite the opening paragraph, call the supplier, run the failing test. A vague frog is easy to stare at.
5. It is in your hands. If it depends on someone else replying first, your frog is the message asking them to.

One frog a day is plenty. Pick three and you are back to an ordinary to-do list. Planning your day in five minutes covers how the frog fits alongside the rest of the day's priorities.

Does eating the frog always work?

Doing the hardest thing first is good default advice, not a law. It fits some days and some people badly, and the fix is usually to adjust when you eat the frog, not whether.

Some people find that one quick, easy task first builds momentum. That is fine, as long as the warm-up is short and the frog comes straight after it. The risk is a warm-up that quietly becomes the whole morning, so decide in advance what the warm-up is and when it ends.

The last row matters. If nearly everything has felt impossible to start for a long time, a better method won't fix it. Long stretches of dread, exhaustion and feeling ineffective can be signs of burnout, and they are worth raising with a doctor or someone you trust. Burnout symptoms at work covers what to look for.

How do you plan tomorrow's frog today?

Tracy suggests planning each day the evening before, and for the frog it may be the most useful part of the method. In the morning you are fresh but easily pulled into the inbox. The evening before, you know exactly where the work stands.

At the end of the day:

1. Look at what is still open and ask which item you would most like to have finished by lunchtime tomorrow.
2. Write the frog and its first step somewhere you will see before email. A pinned note in Notes called "Frog" works, and so does a sticky note on the keyboard.
3. Give it a time. In Calendar, press Command-N to make an event for tomorrow morning and name it after the task, not "Focus". If you prefer lists, add it to Reminders with tomorrow's date and it shows up in the Today list when the morning comes.
4. Leave the file open, or note exactly where you stopped, so the first minute tomorrow isn't spent finding your place.
5. Close everything else. A clear screen in the morning makes the frog the obvious first thing.

The next morning, open the frog before you open Mail. If you want a fence around it, switch on a Focus in Control Center and notifications will wait until you are done. Focus modes on Mac covers the setup step by step.

A robot that asks for one frog

Habits like this slip on the busy mornings, the ones where you sit down and the first notification wins. Notchpals can do some of the asking. If your crew includes a Focus character, its Plan the day moment comes once on weekday mornings, before 11 and only while you are at the Mac. Bolt, the retro robot, treats it as a system requirement:

BoltI have one antenna and one job. Today, you also have one job. Pick it.

That one job is your frog. Name it, press Done and open the file. To hold the rest of the morning off, give the frog a focus session from the Notchpals icon in the menu bar, 25 minutes or 50. Until the timer runs out, the other characters keep their lines to themselves. Only Focus moments, a battery on the edge of dying and a meeting that is about to begin get through.

The evening half of the method can have a cue too. A Schedule character such as Walter drops by once on weekday evenings with the Wrap up moment:

WalterEvening. Drop anchor. Work's done for the day.

Before you take his advice, spend one more minute writing down tomorrow's frog. Notchpals never knows what the frog is or whether you ate it. It picks the moment to ask and trusts your Done.