Eat The Frog: Tackle The Hardest, Important Tasks First

What’s the very first thing you do at the start of your working day? Do you ease into it with some cruisy email responses, or do you jump straight into the hard tasks?

The ones you’d like to ignore, but know you can’t because they’ll keep coming back to stare you down. The ones that seem to evolve into meaner, greener, greater task monsters, also known as: frogs!

If you belong to the second group, the one who takes on challenges first thing in the morning, then you’re an Eat-The-Frog kind of person. It may not sound praiseworthy, but it is. While it may not be a method that suits everyone, it’s definitely one that works wonders for procrastination and helps you action the truly important tasks, first thing in a working day.

In this blog post, we explain how the Eat The Frog Method works and why you should try it out.

What Is The Eat The Frog Method?

Eat The Frog is a prioritization and productivity technique that aims to get the most difficult and important task out of your hair, first thing every morning.

It’s one of the best strategies to set your day up for success and stop avoiding challenging tasks which must be done.

By eating your frog early in the morning, you’ll achieve three things:

1. Prevent procrastination – Difficult and complex tasks tend to be put off until the last minute. When you consciously decide to take action and prioritize them, you remove the possibility of procrastination rearing its ugly head into the mix.
2. Decrease stress – You know that feeling you get when a too-hard task weighs down on you like a tonne of bricks? The longer you avoid it, the heavier it gets, and the feeling of stress and pressure gets the better of you. When you use this method, you’ll probably never get that feeling again because your hard tasks will always be actioned immediately.
3. Increase motivation – Few things in life give you the feeling of satisfaction and contentment than when you’ve finally accomplished something that was a huge feat. And when you do get into that zone, you feel like you could take on the world. That feeling of zest and motivation is something this method will help you experience over, and over, again.

Eating a frog may not sound particularly appetizing. However, reading those three points certainly makes it enticing enough to try. Don’t you think?

3 Steps To Eat The Frog Method

If we haven’t convinced you of the potential that lies in applying the Eat The Frog method, we’re pretty sure the simple three steps it’s based on, will. At the very least, it’s sure to make you curious enough to test it out for yourself.

Step 1: Identify Your Frog (The Night Before)

The first step is to identify your daily frog the night before you feast on it. Now, not every item on your to-do list will be a frog. And ideally, you don’t want to have more than two frogs to take on in a day. So bear that in mind when you sit down to make your selection.

Similarly, what feels like a frog to one person (because it’s new and challenging), might not be for another (because it's something they enjoy doing).

So, frogs need to be determined individually, by the person who will be eating them.

To help you work out your frogs, make a list of all your tasks and ask yourself these questions:

Chances are you’ll pick up your frog relatively quickly. Most people can recognize it by gut feel. However, if you find it a bit of a struggle (because there are many equally important items on your list), you could use a more refined task prioritization technique like the Eisenhower Matrix, or the MoSCoW Method. Both will help you map out, and rank tasks by priority.

Note: You might be wondering why we suggest you pick your frog the night before. The reason for this is so you don’t waste the precious cognitive focus you have in the morning, on mere tasks like to-do lists. Instead, you’ll get straight to the stuff that matters!

Step 2: Schedule Your Frog (First Thing In The Morning)

The next step is to schedule your frog for tomorrow’s breakfast. Now this is one of the key rules of this method: Frogs must be eaten at the start of your working day. This means: before emails, before team chat messages and funny memes, and definitely before any meetings.

This might sound harsh and unrealistic, but if you want the method to work, you must trust and respect the process. And the process calls for a fresh mind, with zero distractions, and total task immersion.

But realistically, how does one do that when they’re not their own boss, and they work in a team? Simple. You do that with another productivity hack, called time blocking.

Here are a few tips you can use to time block and schedule your daily frogs:

• Create a recurring frog block – Instead of letting other people dictate the available time in your diary, take the lead by creating a recurring frog block time slot that will be dedicated to your most important and challenging tasks on a regular basis. You may not need to do this every day but it’s worth having 2-3 days where your best and most productive hours are used on the most difficult and important tasks.
• Divide and conquer the frog – While Eat The Frog guidelines recommend a frog be a 1-4–hour meal (maximum), in reality, many challenging tasks will take much longer. This doesn't mean the method won’t work for these more time-consuming initiatives. It simply means you should break them down into smaller chunks, and divide them over several days.
• Take the block seriously – When you create the frog block in your calendar, you need to take it seriously. And by this we mean, you need to stick to it. So silence your phone, sign out of work collaboration tools that can distract and interrupt you, and give all your attention to the frog task. This is the only way you'll be able to dedicate yourself enough to produce the quality outcome you’re after.

Step 3: Eat Your Frog (Every Day)

The final, and most difficult part of the method is to actually eat the frog: sit down and do the task. Now we know this is easier said than done. But like all habits, once you do it enough times, it becomes second nature. And that’s the point you want to get to: to eat your frogs daily, first thing in the morning, without procrastinating and complaining.

However, knowing all this still doesn’t make it any easier to actually start a difficult task.

So if that’s the case, then you need to apply some sort of a reward system that will motivate and inspire you to sit through the frog meal.

Here are a couple of ways you might be able to push yourself:

• Introduce an incentive – It might sound silly, but adults, like children, can be nudged to do something they don’t really enjoy or feel like doing when there is a reward provided at the end. So try to introduce an incentive or reward after every frog date.
• Apply the 5-minute rule – The most difficult point to overcome in any task is the initial start. That first step is like a massive mountain climb to what ends up being a walk up a hill. If this is your biggest obstacle, then it might be worth trying the 5-minute rule which simply says: commit yourself to work on the task for five minutes only. In most cases, this gets you over the bump and you’ll probably continue working because you’ll realize it was much harder to start, than it is to continue working.

Pros & Cons of The Eat The Frog Method

Like most hacks, the Eat The Frog method has its limitations and comes with its unique list of perks and drawbacks. Let’s take a look at what they are.

Perks of Eat The Frog method:

• Promotes priority action – One of the biggest perks of the method is that it pushes a person to do not just something, but to do the one thing that needs to be done most.
• Focuses on overwhelming tasks – If you notice you evade and wriggle your way out of making tough decisions, or taking on difficult tasks, this method could help push you to face your fears, because instead of avoiding hard tasks regularly, you'll start actioning them daily.
• Builds resistance – The other benefit that leads on from the previous point, and which may not seem like an obvious outcome of using the method, is that it builds your resistance to challenging tasks. This is a super-valuable trait to have in any professional setting.
• Effective use of time – Aside from the fact that it helps minimize procrastination, which also reduces anxiety and stress levels, it provides an effective and dynamic start to your day. Taking advantage of your daily energy peak, and dedicating it to complex tasks, lets you ease into the rest of the day because the hardest part has been done.
• Broad application – Finally, the beauty of this method is that it can be applied to any and all types of tasks. A frog can be writing a blog article, developing a project initiation document, or creating a standard operating procedure document. But, it can also be having a difficult conversation with an employee or client, or making a call on which tools to unsubscribe from.

Drawbacks of Eat The Frog method:

• Not for morning people – If you’re not a morning person, this method might not fit your working style. However, you could accommodate it to your working rhythm. If you start work in the evening, your frog could simply become your dinner!
• May not fit certain work roles – The theory behind the advice is great, but for some professionals who are in leadership or customer-facing roles, it might be a difficult strategy to apply. If your role is an ‘on-call’ type where you need to be available and reachable all the time, it’s highly unlikely you’ll be able to block time where nobody interrupts.
• Doesn’t work for equal-priority tasks – If you have two big tasks hounding your mind, choosing one will be difficult. And even when you choose one, chances are the other will still be haunting you so your focus won’t be on the task at hand 100%.
• Counterproductive for ADHD – While there is no research backing this claim yet, there are several online blogs written by people with ADHD, who have tried and tested the method, and who feel it produces the opposite effect.

How ActiveCollab Helps You Manage & Track Your Frog Tasks

Prioritization and productivity hacks like Eat The Frog can work wonders for people when it comes to identifying, and actioning, the most important tasks in a day. This is because it’s one of the simplest, and most effective methods for organizing your daily to-do list.

As a productivity and resource management tool, ActiveCollab has all the features you’ll ever need to create, manage and keep on top of your daily frog tasks, as well as work and client to-do lists.

It lets you create client or project portfolios, add an unlimited number of tasks, label and colour-code them (perhaps make them green!), and schedule them in your calendar with due dates for completion.

As a professional services software platform, we work hard to identify, and provide all the features a client-facing SME, like an agency, or consultancy might need to run their entire suite of workflows, seamlessly. So we’re not just a project or task management tool. We’re also a collaboration, workload management, time-tracking and invoicing tool.

If all those things are the things you are looking for in one tool, but you currently use several, it might be time to test-drive ActiveCollab. Sign up for our 14-day free trial or book a demo to get a guided tour of the entire platform from one of our super friendly team members!