Today you’ll learn how use the “eat the frog” technique to help you stop procrastinating, improve your productivity, and set you up for success first thing in the morning.
Mark Twain once said that if you have to eat a live frog, do it first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day.
The productivity idea here is that you identify one challenging task (the frog) and complete the task first thing in the morning (eating it).
While eating the frog doesn’t sound like the most delicious thing to do literally or figuratively, it will make your days easier in the long run.
Here’s how it works.
The eat the frog strategy focuses solely on completing one task for the day.
That’s it.
So we’re clear here, this means not responding to emails, checking Slack, or anything else first thing.
Eating the frog helps you minimize multitasking so you can focus on just the frog—everything else comes later.
Then, after you’ve completed your most challenging task, you have the rest of your day to complete the smaller tasks that are on your to-do list or in your inbox without the dread of having to do the hardest thing on your list.
Getting the hardest thing out of the way gets your intrinsic motivation rolling to dominate the rest of your day.
And….This technique takes advantage of your most efficient working hours.
If you don’t believe me or Mark Twain, believe the research
Scientists have found that people’s speed and accuracy at completing tasks are better in the morning.
A Study from the Journal of Medicine titled Diurnal variation in logical reasoning had subjects perform two tests of logical reasoning at each of six different times of day.
In terms of speed, performance on both tests was found to improve markedly from 08.00 to 14.00 and then to fall off fairly rapidly. Accuracy was found to decrease fairly linearly over the day.
Identify the hardest task you have for the day
Dive in first thing until you’re finished or you hit a goal for that task if it’s a longer term task like writing a book, report. This can be anything from having a hard conversation to figuring out a problem, whatever it is, tackle it first thing in the morning and you’re going to find yourself feeling more productive and satisfied with your days.
Your move.
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