Eat the frog: How completing your biggest tasks first sets you up for success
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There are few self-help concepts more intriguing than “eat the frog”. It’s mysterious, oddly named and has disputed origins, and yet the structure it provides can benefit professionals in all roles and industries.
In this article, you’ll learn how eating the proverbial frog can help you stay organized, nail challenging tasks and ultimately get more done. We’ll also run through some tips to help you maximize your productivity boosts.
"Eat the frog" definition:
To eat the frog is to complete your biggest, most difficult task first so that nothing worse can happen for the rest of your day.
It’s a concept often attributed to the 19th-century author Mark Twain, who according to many online sources once said:
“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.”
We can’t prove that Twain ever said these words and there are various other potential origins. More recently, self-development author Brian Tracy adapted the idea for a business audience in his 2001 book, Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time.
In a blog post on the topic, Tracy writes:
Say you’re a sales leader carrying out a team-wide performance review. Your analysis leaves you with two tasks: to build a development plan for an underperforming rep and give praise to another who’s hit their quota early. By working on the development plan (the most demanding of the two tasks) first, you’re able to shed any associated stress before moving on to the second, easier task later in the day.
Who can benefit from the eat the frog productivity method?
While Brian Tracy claims that eating the frog is “a habit well-adopted among successful people”, the truth is it works better for some than others. Its effectiveness comes largely down to which productivity challenges you already face.
You’ll reap the biggest benefits if you’re someone who:
Procrastinates a lot. We all do it, but by pushing tasks back you’re delaying the inevitable. Avoid them for too long and you’ll end up rushing work that really matters.
Prefers easy over complicated work. Not all work is created equal. Focusing too much energy on shallow tasks can create a false sense of productivity. You may check many things off your list, but overlook the tasks that prove most valuable to your team or business.
Struggles to prioritize tasks. Prioritization is the essence of eat the frog, meaning it forces you to label at least one task as “important” every day. That habit will train you to organize all your work by value.
These characteristics transcend job roles and industries. Whether you’re in sales, marketing, construction, or project management, eating the frog can help keep you focused.
How to identify frogs
The first challenge of frog-eating is identifying your frog tasks. The better you are at this and the more practice you get, the less time you’ll spend comparing your options each day so you can start working faster and accomplishing more.
Everyone’s frog criteria are different. There’ll be some tasks you dislike or struggle with that others can gleefully race through, and vice versa. However, there are some common characteristics to look out for when prioritizing:
It’s important but not urgent
Frogs aren’t necessarily time-sensitive. Focus on activities that have the biggest positive impact on your team or business, rather than small, reactive tasks like replying to emails or arranging meetings. These smaller actions may feel urgent but can often wait until you’ve achieved something that directly contributes to a performance objective.
It requires more time or focus
Frogs are often time-consuming. Due to their value and importance, they require greater focus, so by tackling them first you’re less likely to rush toward the end of the day and produce subpar work.
The purpose of eating the frog is to make your whole day more productive, not just the first part. Consider putting a half-day limit on your priority tasks so you have time for other work. If a task will take more than four hours, try breaking it up into smaller actions and follow it up the next day.
It comes with some mental resistance
Frogs are challenging by nature. It could be something you’re under pressure to complete, and that’s causing you to procrastinate or worry, or perhaps it’s just something you don’t enjoy doing.
For example, if your manager is repeatedly chasing you for progress updates on one task but not others, you might feel anxious about getting it done and getting it right. Doing that task first will alleviate some stress, allowing you to apply a clearer mind to other work.
It can’t be automated
Frogs always require human attention. If a task can be automated, use the technology available to you and turn your attention to something that demands your skill and intelligence.
For example, synchronizing customer data across different tools is a valuable but menial and time-consuming activity for most sales teams. By using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool with workflow automation features, you can eliminate this task from the equation without cutting any corners.
3 ways that eating frogs makes you more productive
Eat the frog improves productivity in three ways:
1. It builds confidence for the rest of the day (and beyond)
By achieving something substantial early in the day, you’ll put yourself into a positive mindset and remind yourself how capable you are.
The bigger the accomplishment, the more dopamine your brain releases and the better you feel. That release can reduce stress to improve your performance during other tasks.
The more frogs you eat, the bigger the long-term rewards. It’s a classic example of habituation, which essentially means it gets easier the more you do it.
In short, make it a habit to eat the frog every day and your daunting tasks should gradually become less problematic.
2. It forces you to prioritize and be more organized
Ever look at your to-do list and tackle the first thing that jumps out? By doing this you risk overlooking the most important tasks and either:
Run out of time to complete them; or
Force yourself to complete difficult work later in the day when your focus is waning.
The eat-the-frog approach forces you to consider which work matters most. Picking out one big task every day teaches you how to assess the value of smaller tasks, too, as you learn which characteristics to look for. By completing your whole to-do list in a more logical order, you’ll improve your overall performance and efficiency.
3. It helps you capitalize on your most productive working hours
While not everyone favors mornings, there is some truth in the idea that “the early bird gets the worm.”
One in-depth study (How the time of day affects productivity: Evidence from school schedules), published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), concluded that “productivity [among research subjects] is higher in the morning than the afternoon and that this variation in productivity can be exploited to increase efficiency.”
Eat the frog is a time management tactic that could, if you’re a morning person or eager to eat the frog early, ensure you spend your most efficient hours wisely.
The disadvantages of eating the frog
If eat the frog were flawless, it’d be the standard in all professions.
The truth is there are a few reasons to be cautious. Understanding them can help you avoid the pitfalls and take advantage of the concept’s most valuable aspects.
In the interest of balance, here are three minor downsides of the eat the frog method:
It leaves less room for dynamism. Some smaller tasks really are urgent, and they can arise without notice. If you’re deep in an eat the frog task with little intention of answering phone calls, checking emails, or speaking to colleagues until you’re finished, you risk causing a productivity bottleneck for your team or, worse, letting a client down.
A difficult start can set a negative tone. Just as significant accomplishments release dopamine and inspire confidence, work that doesn’t go well (and it will happen at some point) can have a lasting negative effect. If you let a challenging morning damage your mood, it could hinder productivity later in the day.
It’s too rigid for some people. Research tells us most people are more productive in the morning, but there will always be some whose best hours come later in the day. For these people, it’s sensible to start with smaller tasks and build up to the most important things.
Eat the frog doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You can alleviate some of its disadvantages by allowing for flexibility, and using your experience to choose when you break the big-task-first pattern.
For example, on a short-term project with fast-evolving objectives, adaptability is essential. New challenges could arise at any time and you may be more dependent on other team members’ schedules. In this instance eat the frog works well as a default but be ready to switch your focus when more pressing tasks come up.
5 tips on eating the frog for optimal productivity
Eat the frog takes time and practice to master. This is especially true if you’re more familiar with another productivity approach, like the ABCDE method (a priority-setting tactic that involves assigning letters to all tasks based on their importance) or the sprint-based Pomodoro technique.
If you’re considering giving eat the frog a go, here are five tips to help you get off to a great start:
1. Set team member expectations
When your colleagues know how you like to organize your task list, they know what to expect in the way of email responses and meeting availability. Tell them that you’re trying a new way of working, provide a quick eat the frog summary, and explain how by improving your personal productivity, it benefits the whole team.
Use your email signature or messenger status to warn that you can’t always respond to messages or invites immediately, and explain how others should reach you with any (genuinely) urgent matters.
2. Break tasks over four hours into smaller steps
The purpose of eat the frog is to make your whole day more productive, not just the first part.
Choose tasks that you’re confident will fit into the first half of your day. Anything that’s likely to run over, break down into two or more actions and spread them out over the week. Four hours (half a day) is a good marker to use but adjust it if your typical working day is longer or shorter than a typical nine-to-five.
By making sure you always have time for smaller, less important work like this, you’ll avoid your task list getting out of control.
3. Plan your frogs the night before, at the earliest
Eat the frog is a time management hack rather than a scheduling strategy. As you get into the habit of picking and completing your biggest tasks first, you might get tempted to start laying out your whole week, but this leaves little room for priorities to change.
By all means, write a weekly to-do list but make it a rule not to pick your frogs any earlier than the nights before you work on them. This way you can make an informed decision about what really needs your attention at that moment.
4. Keep using your task and project management tech
Eat the frog should supplement rather than replace any task scheduling or project management tools you already use.
Apps like Asana and Trello (two of many tools that integrate with Pipedrive) create accountability across your organization so that even when you and your team members are choosing which tasks to tackle first, there’s no risk of anyone avoiding or forgetting their responsibilities.
If you’re responsible for scheduling tasks for others, be sure to allocate them to days or weeks rather than specific times. This will give team members the freedom to plan their days how they like and to eat the frog if that’s what works for them.
5. Learn how to separate one frog from the next
There’s no guarantee that you’ll only have one big, daunting or time-consuming task to complete on a single day. When you spot more than one obvious frog on your to-do list, you can still schedule each for the same day, but always tackle the most important task (MIT) first. This will be the one that contributes most to a wider team or business objective, perhaps by easing a productivity bottleneck.
If you don’t have the time to eat two frogs, kick one to the following day.
Final thoughts
When applied with care and in the right circumstances, eat the frog is a powerful technique for increasing productivity. Its simple structure can help you overcome common bad habits like procrastinating, so you become more valuable to your team and organization.
For the best results, find your perfect balance between routine and flexibility. The more you prioritize bigger tasks, the less daunting they’ll become, but don’t let your new way of working stop you from adapting to changing situations and objectives.
