Do the worst thing first thing (”Eat the frog”)

“Eat a live frog every morning, and nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day.” So says Mark Twain. Or so says a productivity guru says Mark Twain. But as far as we can tell, Mark Twain never said that. So what’s with all the frogs, and how can they help us do more of the right stuff, and less of the wrong?

M de Lassay, a very pleasant man, but who had a great knowledge of society, said that it would be necessary to swallow a toad every morning, in order not to find anything disgusting the rest of the day, when one has to spend it in the world.

This is an excerpt from an essay by William Mathews published in 1877, and it’s about the closest we can get to the meaning the author of the book Eat That Frog had in mind. Incidentally, the distinction between frog and toad is a matter of translation.

Eat That Frog is a book by Brian Tracy, that’s often cited among productivity nerds. It’s intended to help you make meaningful progress to a big goal, by doing the stuff you’re procrastinating over.

I should also note this has nothing to do with putting frogs in boiling water either. And frankly, why we’re being so awful to frogs is beyond me… it’s not their fault they’re ugly; that’s certainly no reason to cook and eat them.

Almost any creative endeavour means telling strangers you exist. You want people to come to your street food van, or pick up your book in a bookshop, or buy your music. For most of us, that’s the job we hate the most. That is our frog.

Photo of a young female singer with a guitar, performing on a bridge in the rain

Meet Amy

She’s 11, and she wants to be a singer like Adele. Every weekend she takes to the streets of Cork in Ireland, and plays for the shoppers. Her dad uploads videos of her performances to YouTube. One or two of them go viral, and she ends up on TV, collaborating with established pop artists, and releasing her own single.

Amy’s story started in 2016. She’s 19 now, and she’s regularly on TikTok and now on the radio. She has a pleasant-enough voice, but it’s not wholly unique. She’s worked hard, learning to sing, and play the piano, guitar, and uke. She’s put the hours in, and while she’s enjoyed a healthy heaping of luck along the way, luck alone doesn’t get you six and a quarter million YouTube subscribers. It might get you views; it doesn’t get you fans.

So why am I talking about Amy? Because every day she ate her frog. She practiced in her bedroom, and on weekends she got up, took to the streets with her dad, and performed for strangers. She’s got more brass neck than a trombone, and now she’s no longer chasing her dream – she’s living it.

You see, despite the name and the sliminess it implies, your frog doesn’t have to be a punishing task. At its heart, the frog you need to eat is just the biggest thing you need to tackle today to move you closer to your goal. It just so happens that often, the thing that will move the needle for you is something you don’t want to do, probably because it’s not something you know how to do. But if you can get it out of the way early doors, you’ll feel like a damn hero.

The (in)famous study on goal-setting

So, what is it you’re working towards? What is your big goal, and how clearly have you defined it? That’s the first step to getting what you want, because once it’s specific, it can be broken down into smaller parts. Writers write. Singers sing. Chefs cook. And if you can do something – one thing – every day that edges you closer to your goal, you’ll accomplish up to 10 times more than someone who doesn’t.

Except, that’s not true. Not at all. Those numbers, cited by Brian Tracy, come from a Yale University study that never actually happened.

Depending on who you ask, there was a study performed in the 50s either by Harvard or Yale, into what happens when people set goals. The study purportedly found that only 3% of people on average had written goals. And those that did were up to 10 times more likely to be financially successful in later life.

This is an often cited study, and it turns up in lots of business books, but there’s no evidence that any such study took place. Oh no, my goals!

OK, so while we don’t have a rich data source from the ‘50s to back up the importance of goal setting, we do have a smaller study from 2007.

Those who wrote their goals accomplished significantly more than those who did not write their goals.

This comes from a real study in 2007, and it goes deeper than just setting goals. The study found that those who wrote down their goals, broke them down into individual actions, and got a friend to hold them accountable, achieved significantly more than those who didn’t, and even scored over those that just wrote their goals down.

OK so we get it. Writing your goals down is good. What next?

Well, as that study found, breaking your big goal into smaller chunks is crucial. So think like Amy, practicing every day on the piano or the guitar, heading out every weekend to busk, and sitting with her dad to post her videos to YouTube. Consistent actions that compound over time.

Like I said, singers sing, writers write, chefs cook. So what is something achievable you can do every day that will get you where you want to be?

Planning your day around your frog

Once you’ve figured that out, the next thing to do is plan your day. The best time to do this is the night before. Sit down with a pen and a pad of paper, or grab your phone. Figure out the shape of your day, and what you can fit in and around it.

If you work for yourself – or even if you work flexibly from home – this should be pretty easy. Just organise your day so you can do the big job first, even if it’s uncomfortable. I doubt, for example, that Amy wanted to practice every day. And to be fair I don’t know if she did, but she clearly put enough hours in.

But books like Eat That Frog sell well among people who have lots of autonomy over their time. If that doesn’t apply to you, is there something you can do before your work day starts? Lots of people go to the gym first thing. These people are maniacs and must be stopped, but they have a point – they’re doing the hard thing first so it’s out of the way.

Not all of us have that luxury, though. Eating that frog is all well and good if you have autonomy over your day, but what if you just can’t make the time in the morning? We’ll get to that in just a sec.

If your goal is the kind of project that squeezes into all the empty spaces in your brain, you’ll probably find it’s among one of the first things you want to do once you get home from work. But it gets tricky if you come home from work and you’re too drained to work on your big goal.

If that’s true for you, it might be worth sitting with some tricky questions about your day job. What would be the consequences of reducing your hours or looking for a less demanding role? On the face of it, those questions might wreak of privilege, but it all depends on your tolerance for risk.

And that’s why I used the word “achievable” earlier on. If you’re 6 ft 2, you’re unlikely to be a successful jockey, no matter how badly you want it or how much you train… it’s just biology. Or physics. I’m not sure. Either way, if you really want something and you can make some sacrifices, you could get there a lot quicker. Just something to think about.

What happens if your frog goes uneaten?

Speaking as we were about consequences, another important question to ask yourself is “What are the consequences of not eating my frog?” In our case, we’re talking about the frog attached to your creative goals, not your day job if you have one. At work, if you don’t eat your frog, you get the sack or you lose your clients.

But if we’re working towards a more long-term goal, the consequences of not eating the frog are a bit more nebulous. So when our internal voice says “Man, I really don’t want to do this today”, tack the word “but” on the end, and see what happens.

“Man, I really don’t want to draw another elbow, but if I don’t, I’m not going to get better at drawing full body portraits.”

And this is where accountability can swoop in to help. “Man, I really don’t want to practice the guitar today, but if I don’t, I’ll be embarrassed in front of my teacher”.

So, let’s assume you’ve got some degree of autonomy over your day, and you can choose how to schedule your time. In that case, it’s time to prioritise.

What even is the most important thing?

List out all your tasks for the day and then, next to each one, write the letter A, B, C, D, or E. Use A for the most important tasks – the frogs you need to eat – and then work your way through the letters, giving the next most-important jobs the B grade, all the way down to E for the least important jobs.

Books like this and Getting Things Done seem to want you to work until all the jobs are done… or at least everything except the D and E jobs. But as I’ve said before, it’s a tenet of this podcast that you’re never going to do all the things, so just like the salty shards at the bottom of a Pringles can, you might just have to let them go, lest you trap your metaphorical arm in the tube that is your day… look, the metaphor’s getting away from me. Point is, your battery runs for a limited time – for most of us it’s about 8 hours – but not all batteries are sized equal. So do the most important thing each day, and punt the rest to tomorrow.

Now, here’s a question – what is the most important thing? Sure, practice is one example, but what if you’re already pretty hot at what you do, or practice just isn’t a thing that’ll move the needle for you? In that case, focus on what you can measure, and make the thing you measure the thing you actually do.

Young woman approaching an internal door in a building, with a guitar case strapped to her back

Making the right thing the easy thing

Once you’re set on what you need to do, the next thing is to prepare the way. Our singer Amy is more likely to shoot a quick video of her playing the guitar if she doesn’t have to grab the guitar case from the closet and retune it every time. There are plenty of anecdotal cases of people wearing their running clothes to bed so they can jump out of bed and go for that 5k… but most of these people don’t wear sports bras.

Another reason you want to make sure to have everything to hand is because it’s super easy to get distracted or procrastinate. What starts off as a quick trip to the kitchen to fill a glass of water ends up with you doing the dishes and cleaning the air fryer because it’s suddenly infinitely more vital than, for example, writing the caption for your next video.

And while we’re on the topic of procrastination, another important factor in frog eating is not trying to do anything else at the same time. Multitasking is a myth. When we think we’re doing multiple things at once, what we’re usually doing is one task poorly, one at a time. So set out some time to eat your frog, and bear in mind Parkinson’s Law from last week’s episode so you don’t end up spending longer than you need to.

Here comes our old friend, imposter syndrome

Another reason we put off eating our frogs is because we don’t think we’re good enough. What if I put out my podcast and it sounds rubbish? What if I develop a new bold flavour of hot sauce only to find it tastes horrible?

There’s a book about reaching big goals called 10x is Easier Than 2x. It’s horribly coachy, but it makes an important point. You might be thinking “who am I to have this big, audacious goal? I don’t have the talent or the skills to achieve it”. And you’d be right.

Of course you don’t have the right stuff right now. If you did, you’d already be at your goal. So part of frog-eating is about doing the stuff we suck at, so we can get better at it, or doing the stuff we’re mediocre at, so we can get great. Line up your frogs every day and then nom, nom, nom. With each amphibian consumed, you only grow stronger!

So when we boil this all down – sorry to be mixing my metaphors again – we’re really just talking about getting the harder stuff done as early as possible. Coach, author, and podcaster Mel Robbins advocates for the “5-second rule”, where you think about what you need to do, count from five to one and then do the thing that leaps immediately to mind.

Are frogs good for you, first thing in the morning?

Columnist and startup chaser Thomas Oppong has also sung its praises, and countless todo and organisation apps have written about the benefits. And sure, it all sounds like common sense, but is it possible that doing the stuff we least want to do is setting ourselves up for a miserable day?

The fundamental flaw in the eat the frog approach, according to Art Markman, professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas, is that crossing off our most hated tasks first thing in the morning puts us in a negative headspace for the rest of the day, and our work suffers as a result.

That comes from an article by Kate Neilson in the news site for the Australian HR Institute. She cites Art’s article for Fast Company, which suggests that when people are in a positive mood, they’re more inclined to creativity.

Makes perfect sense, right? When have you ever produced amazing work off the back of a crabby mood?

Ultimately it probably comes down to the task at hand, and how you’re feeling from one day to the next. I mean, it’s easy enough to write a todo list for future you, that present you looks at with utter disdain, especially after a rubbish night’s sleep.

So if you’re wondering whether eating the frog might work for you, ask yourself whether it aligns with the sort of work you want to do. Does it fit into the pattern of your normal work day, or is it unrealistic? Is eating your frog going to help you feel satisfied, or will you carry the grump and frustration throughout the day? Are there frogs you’re already eating, and it’s just a matter of applying the same approach to other work?

And finally, will it get you closer to your end goal, and if so, what will be the cost?