The eat the frog method means doing your biggest, most important task first, before easier jobs fill your day. It comes from Brian Tracy's book Eat That Frog!, where your frog is the task you are most likely to put off. Pick one frog the night before, start on it early, and protect that first block of time.
In Eat That Frog!, Brian Tracy writes: "Your 'frog' is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don't do something about it." He adds that it is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your results at the moment.
Tracy gives two rules of frog eating:
"If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first."
"If you have to eat a live frog at all, it doesn't pay to sit and look for very long."
In other words, start with the hardest important task, and start quickly. The name comes from a saying about eating a live frog each morning, so nothing worse can happen the rest of the day. It is often credited to Mark Twain, but Quote Investigator found no substantive evidence that Twain said it. It believes the saying grew out of a line by the French writer Nicolas Chamfort, whose works were published in the 1790s, about swallowing a toad every morning.
When we're busy, easy tasks are tempting. A study published in Management Science looked at 84 emergency department doctors who treated more than 233,000 patients from 2005 to 2010. The doctors chose which patient to see next. As their workload grew, they became more likely to pick easier cases: each extra patient already in their care was linked to an 8% higher chance of choosing a lower-acuity, likely simpler, case.
Picking easy cases helped in the short term, with more patients seen per shift. But the doctors who took on harder cases got faster over time and were more productive later on. In a follow-up online experiment with 365 people, 76% of those given a heavy workload chose the easy next task, compared with 64% of those with a lighter load.
The lesson for everyday life: in that research, feeling tired or feeling little progress was linked with picking easy tasks. That is exactly when a frog gets skipped. Choosing your frog in advance takes the decision out of that moment.
Get it all out of your head. Write down everything on your mind. A brain dump works well here.
Ask which task matters most. Tracy suggests thinking about consequences: your most important tasks are the ones with the most serious consequences, good or bad.
Ask which task you are avoiding. It is often the same one.
Rank the rest. Tracy recommends organizing your list by value and priority before you begin, which he calls the ABCDE method.
Size it for one session. "Finish the report" is too big for a morning. Tracy's advice is to slice and dice the task: break it into bite-sized pieces, then do one small part to get started. So your frog might be "Draft the introduction and first section."
Prepare the night before. Tracy suggests having everything you need at hand before you start. Open the file, gather the papers and write the first step on a sticky note.
Example frogs: at work, "Write the first draft of the budget email." At home, "Call the insurance company about the claim." For study, "Do practice problems 1 to 5 for Friday's exam." These are examples, so swap in your own.
Here is an example routine. Adjust it to your day.
The night before: choose tomorrow's frog, write its first step, and set out what you need.
First thing: before email, messages or social media, sit down with the frog. Tracy also suggests learning to occasionally turn technology off and leave it off.
Start small: do the first step only. Once you're moving, keep going if you can.
When the block ends: take a short break, then move on to the rest of your list.
A timer gives a task you dread a clear finish line. Try a short block, like 10 or 25 minutes, and promise yourself only that. When it ends, decide whether to keep going. If you like working in timed rounds, the Honest Little Apps guide to the Pomodoro technique explains one popular way to do it.
Tracy also recommends creating large chunks of time for your most important tasks. A short timer can be your way in, and a longer protected block can be how you finish.
Your best hours come later. Early morning is not magic. Tracy's own advice is to find your periods of highest mental and physical energy and plan your most demanding tasks around them. If you are sharper after lunch, eat the frog then.
Your morning isn't yours. With school runs, shift work or early meetings, eat the frog in your first open block.
The frog is too big. If you can't start, your frog is probably a project, not a task. Slice it again.
Something is truly urgent. A real deadline or emergency comes first. Go back to the frog when it's handled.
You're stuck for days. If dread is the problem rather than planning, try the ideas in how to start a task when you can't get started.
Even the researchers behind the doctor study said more research is needed, and that pushing people toward hard tasks could backfire if they dislike the pressure. Treat the method as a tool, not a test you pass or fail.
The method comes from Brian Tracy's book Eat That Frog! The frog saying is often credited to Mark Twain, but Quote Investigator traces it most likely to Nicolas Chamfort, a French writer of the 1700s.
No. The point is to do it first in your working time, ideally at your best energy. Tracy suggests planning your most demanding tasks around your peak hours.
Tracy's rule is to eat the ugliest one first. Pick the one with the bigger consequences or the one you dread more, then do the other next.
No. Eat the frog decides which task comes first. A timer method like Pomodoro shapes how you work through it. They pair well.
Often the hardest part of a frog is the first bite. Now: ADHD Task Starter shows one task at a time and suggests a first step you can edit, swap or shrink, with a two-minute visual countdown and focus sessions of 5, 10, 15 or 25 minutes, a custom length, or no timer. It is made for anyone who finds starting hard, it doesn't diagnose or treat ADHD, and your tasks stay on your iPhone with no account.