Most people have this notion that productivity is about doing the maximum number of tasks in a day. While you can't deny the small dopamine rush of checking off a task on your to-do list, this approach may not always help you reach your long-term goals.
You may end up checking off all your small tasks first thing in the morning and get drained. You may end up putting off your more significant tasks that need more energy.
Inevitably you end up prioritizing more manageable tasks and procrastinating on the larger ones. The importance of tasks doesn't factor into your decisions.
If you think you're doing this a lot, you may find the "Eat The Frog" method useful.
What Does It Mean to "Eat The Frog"?
Eat the frog is a productivity method that productivity consultant Brian Tracy introduced in his book 'Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time.'
He developed this technique to help practitioners focus all their energy on their day's most important tasks.
The technique advises practitioners to tackle their most important tasks first thing in the day. It doesn't necessarily mean the biggest task of the day; it could be what you dread doing or what you want to put all your energy into.
According to Brian Tracy, "the frog is the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don't do something about it."
Brian Tracy named this technique after the famous words of Mark Twain:
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.
With this approach, you can focus your energy on what matters most. When you have too many tasks, you may put off your most difficult ones until the end. We often clear our easiest tasks first thing when we sit in front of our desks. At the end of the day, we may find that we didn't finish doing what's most important to us.
Another aspect of this is that when we focus our energy on completing the maximum number of tasks a day, we may forget to do what helps us reach our goals. We all have spent entire days cleaning the house or doing the laundry to justify not working on the budget or making a business plan. The Eat The Frog method helps us face our most challenging tasks head-on and reach our long-term goals.
How Does Eat The Frog Work?
Eat The Frog is easy to understand, even if it may take a while to implement it well.
Every day before you start your tasks, pick the most important one. As mentioned before, it doesn’t have to be the task that takes the most time or effort, though it can be. It's what you define as important, often the one you're dreading and most likely to procrastinate on.
Do this task before you do anything else. If you have two or more critical tasks, pick the difficult one first, finish it off, and then move on to the next one.
Make this a daily habit; tackle the most difficult or important task first thing in the morning before moving on to anything else. In the long run, this approach can help you overcome the fear of difficult tasks or stop procrastinating on them.
Combine Eat the Frog With Other Productivity Methods
Eat The Frog method can work for you even if you're using other productivity methods like Getting Things Done or the Pomodoro Technique.
For instance, if you use the Getting Things Done method and plan the tasks for the day or the week, add your frog at the top of the list. Make sure the tasks at the top of your list line up with your long-term goals. If you use the Pomodoro Technique, spend your first Pomodoro, or the first few, on your frog before anything else.
You don’t have to limit yourself to one frog a day. Set your target based on your schedule and the nature of your work to figure this out. Some practitioners go for three or more important daily tasks aligned with their different goals. But it's important to find a steady number and stick to it, or you may procrastinate your tasks again.
You can also combine Eat The Frog with time blocking, by putting your frog in the first block of the day, or with the Ivy Lee Method, by making your frog task number one on the list. It works alongside your existing productivity techniques and gives your most critical task your best energy.
Key Tips to Eating Your Frogs
Here are a couple of tips to make the most out of this productivity method:
1. Choose Your Frogs Well
Your choice of frogs daily can determine how quickly you'll achieve your long-term goals. Generally, you should pick the task you're most likely to put off to another day as the first frog for the day.
But you should also consider your long-term plans when doing this. Picking the task we don't want to do is not always the right approach. For instance, it may not make sense to do your laundry first thing in the day just because you keep putting it off.
When you pick your frogs, ensure you align them with your long-term goals.
2. Don't Procrastinate On Your Frogs
The whole point of this method is to stop procrastinating – to face your frogs. It is to help you reduce the starting friction and get you going.
But the technique is moot if you identify your frogs well but keep procrastinating. Plans and strategies are only as good as how you implement them.
When you procrastinate on your frogs, it can affect your entire day. They will keep hopping around inside your head, distracting you even if you manage to do the rest of your tasks.
Always eat your frogs first thing in the morning.
3. Stick to It as You Would With Any Other Productivity Technique
Eat The Frog is not too complicated to implement. The Getting Things Done method requires some planning to keep you going. The Pomodoro technique requires you to adhere to a schedule. Compared to this, Eat The Frog is easy.
It's as simple as picking the tasks you are likely to procrastinate on and doing them first thing in the morning.
So it's easy for you to forget this or not take it seriously. But to see the results, you must make this a habit and follow it regularly.
4. Don't Try to Eat More Than a Frog at a Time
Your frogs are usually the ones that drain your energy a lot or require all of your focus. One of the goals of this method is to give you that complete flow state when you can focus all your energy on one thing without any distractions.
Since these frogs are your most important daily tasks, you cannot afford to delay them or affect the quality of your output. Our brains are not parallel processors, they're more of serial processors. By trying to tackle more than one, we'll be overloading ourselves. This can affect the quality of your output.
5. Don't Decide Your Frogs Too Far in Advance
Plan your tasks in advance, yes, but don’t pick your frogs any earlier than the night before.
Having a plan will help you manage all of your tasks effectively. It helps you keep everything on track. But life happens, priorities shift, and your plans must be flexible enough to include that. Planning the first thing you're going to do every day will take away this flexibility.
Every day before you start, look at your pending tasks and then identify your frogs. If you want to plan a bit, do this the night before.
6. Test and Figure Out How Many Frogs a Day Work Best for You
Not every productivity technique will work for everyone, however popular it is. You have to work with it for a while and tweak it as needed to make them work. Similarly, with the Eat The Frog approach, having just one frog a day may work for you. But if you wear a lot of hats at your workplace or in your personal life, you may need more than a single frog. In such situations, experiment with two or three frogs and find out which works for you.
Either way, remember that even if you have two or three frogs, you still have to pick one and then do it first, followed by the rest.
How to Eat Your Frogs With MagicTask
MagicTask is a gamified task and project management platform for individuals and teams. It works around your style instead of forcing you into one method.
In My Tasks and in your projects, you can create as many sections as you like. One simple setup for Eat The Frog is a Backlog section for everything that’s waiting and a Focus section for today. Each morning, look at your pending tasks, move your frog into Focus, and drag it to the top so it’s the first thing you see. You can also use Time Blocking to give your frog the first slot of the day.
Working with a team? Assign tasks with all the details right on the task, and add due dates and sizes, so everyone can see what’s important and pick their own frogs for the day.
As you finish tasks, your progress bar fills and moves you through your Dungeon toward the next chest, which makes eating frogs a little more rewarding. Workspace leaderboards are coming soon. Start your 14-day free trial, with no credit card required, and eat your first frog tomorrow morning.
