Eat the frog
Eat the frog means doing your most important, most-dreaded task first, before anything else. The idea, popularised by Brian Tracy's 2001 book Eat That Frog!, is simple: if the first thing you do each morning is the hardest, the rest of the day feels easier and the thing you would most likely have avoided is already done.
- Then, once the frog is eaten
How to eat the frog
- 1Name your frog: the one task that matters most and that you least want to do.
- 2Do it first, before email, before the small stuff, before the day fills up.
- 3Everything after it is downhill, and the hardest thing is already behind you.
Where it comes from, and the Mark Twain myth
The phrase was made famous by Brian Tracy's 2001 book Eat That Frog!, which opens with a line usually credited to Mark Twain: if the first thing you do each morning is eat a live frog, nothing worse will happen to you all day. The catch is that Twain almost certainly never said it. Researchers have found no reliable source in his work, and the earliest link to his name appears in a newspaper decades after his death. The real ancestor is the French writer Nicolas Chamfort, who recorded a version of the idea around 1790. It is a small irony for a method about doing the honest, hard thing first, and a reason to trust the technique more than the quotation.
Why first, and not later
Willpower and focus are highest early and drain through the day, so the hardest task gets your best energy when you do it first. Do it later and it hangs over everything else, quietly taxing every other task until it is done.
There is also the cost of putting it off. A dreaded task does not sit quietly; it colours the whole morning, and every easy thing you do instead is partly avoidance. Doing it first collapses that low background dread into a single, finite effort, and buys back the attention it was quietly taking.
How to pick the right frog
The method is simple; choosing the frog is where it goes wrong. A few rules of thumb:
- Important, not just unpleasant. The frog is the task with the biggest consequence, not merely the one you like least. A tedious errand is not a frog.
- One frog, not a pond. Name three frogs and you have made an ordinary to-do list. Pick the single task that would make the day count.
- Make it doable in one morning. If the frog is really a project, the first concrete step is the frog, not the whole thing.
- Decide it the night before. Choosing your frog while staring at a blank, busy morning is its own kind of delay.
- Do it before the inbox. Once the day's requests arrive, the frog rarely survives contact with other people's priorities.
When it fits, and when it does not
Eat the frog fits when one important task keeps slipping day after day, or when your mornings are your own and you can protect the first hour. It is a direct cure for the specific habit of doing everything except the thing that matters.
It fits less well when your real problem is too many frogs, not avoidance; then the harder skill is choosing which matters most, and a method like Ivy Lee or the 1-3-5 rule does more for you. It also assumes a morning you control. If your first hour belongs to other people, eat the frog at the first quiet moment you do get, rather than forcing it at nine.
Keep your frog in view
NanoDo puts your focus task on your iPhone lock screen so the hard first thing stays in front of you. One-time €4.99, no subscription.