This post is about improving your life and increasing your productivity using the ‘Eat the Frog’ method.
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. The eat-the-frog strategy is a prioritization and productivity method used to help people identify difficult tasks. In this blog post I detail how you can use the “eat the frog” technique to help you stop procrastinating and improve personal productivity. This is a method I use and love. It’s extremely hard, but it has improved my mental health a lot.
”If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.”
Mark Twain
What does “eat the frog” mean?
To put it simply, eating the frog is identifying your most difficult or scary task of the day and completing it before you do any other work.
Does eating the frog work?
While eating the frog doesn’t sound like the most delicious productivity technique, it has helped me become more productive and improved my mental health. Here’s how it works.
Eating the frog sets you up for success early in the day.
The ‘eat the frog’ strategy focuses solely on completing one task for the day. That’s it. Then, after completing your most challenging task, you have the rest of your day to complete the smaller tasks on your to-do list without the dread of having to do the hardest thing on your list. It’s like working out; sometimes, I absolutely dread it, but after it’s done, the endorphins make me happy and energized.
Promotes deep work
Eating the frog method encourages you to choose the most difficult or scary task of the day and do it first thing in the morning. For me, it’s often scary emails. This means you’re not allowed to scroll on TikTok, go shopping, or swipe on Tinder. Eating the frog helps minimize multitasking and forces you to focus on just the frog—everything else can come later.
How do you identify “frogs”?
If you have difficulty prioritizing your endless to-do list, understanding what’s a frog—and what’s not—is the best way for you to tackle your work. Here are a few tricks to figuring out which big task is your frog.
Frogs are important, not urgent.
Frogs come in all sizes—big and small. What may be a small frog to some may be a huge one for another. Like I said, my frogs are typical emails and messages that need answering, and they’re not even scary; they just have a way of filling me with dread and anxiety.
Frogs often come with some resistance.
Nobody wants to eat a live frog first thing in the morning. This holds true for the task that you identify as your frog. For whatever reason, you may be facing some mental resistance towards doing this task.
If your frog is big
If your frog is a big mother-you-know-what frog, then try breaking it down into smaller tasks or smaller frogs, so to speak. If your frog is a ten-page report, maybe write one page a day (if your deadlines allow it)
Time blocking can also be a good method. Block out time, let’s say from 8 to 12 a.m., you work on your frog, and for the rest of your day, you can do your other minor to-do list tasks.
Three tips for eating frogs
If you want to do like Mark Twain did and eat the frog first thing in the morning, try these three tips to eat your frog every morning:
1. Make ‘frog-eating’ a habit
While your frogs are the biggest or scariest task of the day, you’ll need to accomplish many of those big tasks regularly in order to make progress toward whatever goals you may have. The more frogs you eat, the better you become at eating them. Like anything else in life – practice makes perfect.
2. Don’t plan your frogs too far in advance
I plan my frog one day ahead. I’ve found that the best practice is to plan your frog the day before. That way, you know exactly what you’re working on when you come in the next day, and you don’t have to think about anything but eating that frog of yours.
If you plan to eat a frog every day, you’ll continually set yourself up for success ahead of time and you can keep your momentum rolling every morning. If you’re a to-do list girly like myself, make the number one item on said list your frog.
3. Devour your frogs first thing in the morning
The whole point of eating the frog is getting it out of the way so you don’t have to worry about it while working on other tasks. Frogs are mentally challenging and draining, so people often gravitate towards procrastination. DO NOT FALL INTO THAT TRAP.
Conclusion
The point is to beat the temptation to procrastinate by immediately completing the difficult task. That way, you don’t have the looming sense of dread when working on other tasks, and you’re less likely to procrastinate. Whenever I eat my frogs in the morning, the rest of my day is often happier and more productive, and I find myself in a better headspace mentally. Those days are some of my most productive days. Eating ‘live frogs’ is not easy by any means. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But I believe in you.
So go out and devour those frogs of yours like it was ice cream.
