Eat the frog: finish the task you keep putting off, first

Eat the frog means doing your hardest, most important task first, before the easy stuff. The frog is the task you're most likely to put off. You eat it early so it can't hang over the rest of your day.

The phrase comes from Brian Tracy's book Eat That Frog!, which sets out 21 principles for beating procrastination. Tracy defines your frog as your biggest, most important task, the one you're most likely to procrastinate on. If you have two important tasks, he says, start with the biggest and hardest one, begin straight away and keep going until it's done.

Tracy opens with a line he credits to Mark Twain: if the first thing you do each morning is eat a live frog, you can go through the day knowing the worst is probably behind you. Quote Investigator found no solid evidence that Twain ever said it, and traces the idea back to the French writer Nicolas Chamfort, who recorded a man advising people to swallow a toad every morning to face the rest of the day.

Whoever said it first, the advice is the same. Do the unpleasant thing that matters before you do anything else.

A task you're dreading costs you twice. Once when you do it, and again every time you think about it beforehand. Leave it until later and it nags at you all day, through every small job you pick up to avoid it.

Mornings also tend to be the quietest part of the day. Messages haven't piled up, nobody has asked you for anything yet, and you've made fewer decisions. That's when a hard task gets your best effort.

Starting with the frog also changes how the rest of the day feels. Once it's done, even a scrappy afternoon counts as a good day, because the thing that mattered got done.

And it stops the slide. Hard tasks rarely get done at the end of the day. When the frog waits for "later", later turns into tomorrow, then next week.

Your frog is usually the task you'd most like to skip. Ask two questions about each thing on tomorrow's list: does it matter, and am I avoiding it? A frog gets yes to both.

Watch for fake frogs. A task that's urgent and loud isn't automatically your frog. If it's easy and someone is chasing you, you'll do it no matter what. The frog is the one nobody is chasing, which is exactly why it keeps slipping.

1. Pick tomorrow's frog the night before. One task, written down, so you don't spend the morning deciding.
2. Size it to fit your morning. A good frog takes one to three hours. If it's bigger, break off the first chunk and make that tomorrow's frog.
3. Write the very first action. "Open the grant form and fill in section one" is easier to start than "do the grant".
4. Get set up before you stop for the night. Open the file, put the papers on the desk, lay out what you'll need.
5. Start the frog first, before email, messages or news. Even ten minutes of the frog before anything else counts.
6. Keep going until it's done, or until your planned stretch ends. Tracy's rule is to persist until the task is complete.
7. Then do everything else. The rest of the day is yours.

Step 5 is where most people slip, because "just a quick look at my messages" turns into 40 minutes of someone else's priorities. Keep your phone in another room until the frog has had its first stretch.

Tom didn't eat the whole return in one morning. He made each day's frog small enough to start, and he started it first.

Tracy's advice is to eat your frog first thing in the morning. That's hard if you start work at 7am on a ward, do the school run, or don't think clearly until 10.

What matters is that the frog goes first in your first real stretch of free time. A shift worker's frog gets the first quiet hour of the shift or the morning after. A parent's gets the hour after drop-off, and a night owl's gets the first block once they're properly awake.

Keep the order and let the clock move: nothing easier goes in front of the frog.

Eat the frog suits a particular type of person: someone who gets plenty done but still finds the important thing waiting at the end of the week. If you fill your days with quick wins and wonder why the big jobs never move, this is the habit to develop.

It works best when:

• You put off one or two tasks, and the rest of your list gets done.
• You control the first hours of your day, at least most days.
• Your hard tasks are solo work, like writing, studying, forms or planning.
• You're happy to find out which jobs you avoid. A week of picking frogs teaches you a lot about your own habits.

It's a worse fit when other people set your whole day, like a shift on a busy ward or a day of back-to-back calls. Find one protected hour and give it to the frog. And if every task on your list feels like a frog, the list is too long, which is a better problem to fix first. A capped method like the 1-3-5 rule helps there, in work and in the rest of your life.

The idea isn't new, and you'll find many ways to describe it in productivity books and resources. What makes it stick is doing it for a week instead of reading about it.

• Choosing a frog that's too big. "Write the thesis" can't be eaten in a morning. "Draft the methods section" can.
• Eating a fake frog. Clearing the inbox first feels productive, and it's the easy thing dressed up as the hard one.
• Leaving the choice until the morning, when the first message you read starts setting your priorities for you.
• Keeping two frogs. Pick one. If two tasks both qualify, start with the bigger, harder one.
• Eating the same frog for a week. If the frog keeps coming back, it's too big. Shrink tomorrow's piece until you'd feel silly not starting it.
• Beating yourself up on a missed day. Some mornings blow up. Make tomorrow's frog smaller and go again.

This is one rule about order, so it slots into almost any other system:

• In the Ivy Lee method, make the frog task number one on your list of six.
• In the 1-3-5 rule, the frog is usually your one big task.
• With the Pomodoro technique, work on the frog in focused rounds with short breaks, which makes a dreaded task feel shorter.
• With time blocking, the first block of the day belongs to the frog, and nothing else gets booked over it.
• In the Eisenhower matrix, frogs usually live in the important but not urgent box, which is why they keep getting pushed back.

The method needs two things from an app: the frog has to stand out from the rest of the list, and you need a way to start it before anything else grabs you.

1. Each evening, add tomorrow's frog with quick add and mark it p1 with a @frog label: "draft methods section tomorrow p1 @frog". Only one task gets the label.
2. Add its first steps as sub-tasks, so the morning starts with something small and concrete.
3. In the morning, open Today. The p1 and the @frog label mark it out from the rest of the day.
4. Start the focus timer on the frog before you open anything else.
5. If a thought pulls at you mid-frog, send it to yourself as a Telegram message. It becomes a task for later, and you stay on the frog.
6. Make "pick tomorrow's frog" a repeating task with a reminder in the evening, or part of a wind-down routine.

Upcoming shows the rest of your week, so when a frog needs breaking up, you can spread its pieces over days that have room.