I’ve made no secret of the fact that I am chronic procrastinator. And, based on the stats, you probably are too.
I’ve tried and tested scores of different techniques to enhance my productivity with varying success. The likes of the Pomodoro technique was incredibly helpful for me (and is still to this day). Working to my most productive hours when possible is also effective.
I had reasonable results from body doubling with certain measures put in place. And for the last 3 weeks I’ve been trying a technique known as “Eat the Frog,” with some mixed results again.
So let’s dive in and look at whether “Eat the Frog” worked.
What is “Eat the Frog?”
“Eat the Frog,” is a productivity concept which takes its name from this Mark Twain quote:
If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first.
This quote was the basis for productivity consultant, Brian Tracy’s advice to “eat that frog,” and as such “eating the frog” as a term has become associated with this technique.
Ultimately, it’s about getting the hardest/worst thing you need to get done in a day done first.
How to Eat the Frog
So in principle it sounds pretty simple, right? Just do the most important task first? Easy. 🤷♀️
However, it’s more nuanced than that. The most important part of this, arguably, is identifying what the most important task even is.
If you’re someone with a to do list the length of your arm and a feeling that everything is important, this is in itself can be problematic.
For a year or so, I’ve been using the Eisenhower Principle to prioritise tasks. But this is about finding the most important tasks to do – which isn’t necessarily the same.
So I suspended that for 3 weeks and instead focussed on eating the frog. For me, I decided the Frog would be a thing that needed doing that day but that I was dreading.
For me, worrying about upcoming tasks can slow me down making headway through the ones I’m currently working on.
Here are some other things I did which helped:
- I only used this for tasks that could be completed in 3 hours or less. I didn’t want it to take more than half of available working hours in any day
- If a task I was dreading was longer than this (like a multi day project), I first broke it down into smaller 3 hour or less chunks. The process of breaking the task down like this was actually, arguably, as helpful at Eat the Frog itself
The Advantage of Eat the Frog
I found a lot of benefits to this method:
- It increased the amount of work I was getting done in a day. Considerably so actually. Now my day to day tasks vary a lot so perhaps I just had 3 weeks of doing things I work faster on. Or maybe the fact it rained a lot the last 3 weeks made me less inclined to be distracted by thoughts of hiking up hill! Who knows? But ultimately, me trying out this productivity method correlated with an increase in my output
- I felt better by lunch every day. I hate the dread feeling in your stomach about tasks coming up. And this method stopped that altogether by lunch, making the second part of my working day (which is sometimes the afternoon or sometimes the evening) more productive
- It made me properly focus on breaking big tasks down. I had to do this in order to fit them into the method and doing this was incredibly valuable in itself
- I found myself getting through the dreaded task quicker because I was focussing on getting it done in no more than 3 hours
So in all, this was highly effective.
The Disadvantages and Limitations of “Eat the Frog”
There were a couple of key limitations too though:
- Sometimes my most dreaded task isn’t my most important. In fact, I would say most of the time it isn’t. So this felt at odds with how I would normally work, which is to prioritise the most important things first. Sometimes this made me worry about hitting deadlines on more important things. But this was probably outweighed by the fact that when I did make it onto the more important task later in the day, I got there with more focus and fewer distractions so I probably did better work in a faster timeframe
- I was dreading my mornings. I found that knowing I would be taking that task on first put me in a bit of a mood some mornings – not all. And granted, you get the dread out of the way early. But it definitely made early mornings harder for the first week
Would I use “Eat the Frog” again?
Yes. But I don’t think I would implement it constantly. Sometimes it feels at odds with the Eisenhower Principle which I have found to be really helpful. So I tend to use that method more often than not.
However, I think I would adopt an “Eat the Frog mentality,” where, when there are tasks I don’t enjoy on my to do list and on my mind, I would just bite the bullet and do them.
3 weeks was enough for me to adopt that mindset actually. It’s a week since I stopped actively approaching my work in that way every single working day but I still find myself getting “annoying” little tasks out of the way first.
So on days or weeks when I feel like I have lots of little tasks I am not looking forward to, I would probably revisit this for sure.
