Eat that frog!
With thanks to Brian Tracy for his amazing book
I fully believe that the simpler and easier to implement a life hack is, the more likelihood it has of working for people.
Look at techniques such as ‘The 5 second rule’ or even advice your parents may have given you when you were a child when you kept losing your temper — just count to ten, and the anger will subside, they’d tell you, as you were boiling over with rage over some issue which seemed enormous and insurmountable to your childish brain.
And if it makes you smile to think about it, if it’s a bit playful, possibly a teeny bit childish, then so much the better, as far as I’m concerned. You’re not likely to forget it, then.
Eat that frog is a tactic which is insanely easy to implement, and that I’ve been using for years to great success.
I don’t remember now how I came across Brian’s book Eat That Frog!: Get More Of The Important Things Done Today, but I’m pretty sure I read it some time around when it was originally published in 2001.
While I have a truly elephantine memory for a lot of things, I read so many books, many of which spin you off to look up other books and work by other authors (what the marvellous Austin Kleon calls Centrifugal Books) that I rarely remember how I found out about them in the first place. The advent of podcasts and YouTube videos where self help folks interview other authors who of course talk about their own work hasn’t helped me much with that.
Anyway. However I came across it, I’m glad I did.
It’s a really, really simple concept, which goes like this:
Do the most challenging thing on your to do list first
Does that sound comically simple? I recommend reading Brian’s book, to get more of his thoughts behind the idea, but for me, it comes down to:
What you resist gets bigger and scarier, and when you can finally bring yourself to actually do it, the relief you feel is enormous, and you’re often left wondering why you left it so long in the first place
There’s also an emotional and mental load which comes with carrying tasks along with you, day in, day out, especially when you know that they’ll make a difference to your life if you can just bring yourself to do them
Why does this work?
Well, as I’ve written about before, in other articles — including one I published earlier this week about The Challenge Jar — as the day goes on, and the demands of other people, whether it’s your kids, your significant other or your boss, start to encroach on your time, the chances of the thing that you really want to do slipping further and further down the list get greater. And as you get closer to the end of your day, your energy levels and willpower (although the jury’s out on whether willpower is a finite resource or not) dwindle, and you find yourself saying ‘it’s fine, I’ll just do it tomorrow’. Often, tomorrow never comes, and the same task sits there languishing on our to do lists and lurking in our minds, for years!
On the flip side of that, not only does doing the most challenging thing first in your day increase your chances that it’ll get done, it also gives you an enormous psychological boost. You strut into your day with a new sense of bravado, flexing your hands in a ‘bring it on’ kind of a way, like Bruce Lee, knowing full well that as you’ve tackled the biggest, scariest, most hairy and audacious task first, nothing else can come close. Nothing can scare you now. Every other task, even if it might have seemed challenging yesterday, seems smaller and easier in comparison.
And finally, getting rid of that challenging task gives you space for another big or scary task, one which takes you out of your comfort zone, to come and take its place. The tasks we resist are usually those which scare us, ones which we’re not entirely sure we can even do, but every time we take a deep breath and do them anyway, either imperfectly or perfectly (imagine if anything was ever really perfect!) we gain confidence in our own skills, we gain experience and we get valuable feedback about how our efforts landed. The next challenging task then, will be a tiny bit bigger, a little bit scarier, and yet we’re no more frightened of them than we were of the last one, because we know we smashed the last one, and that we’ll smash this one too.
On a practical level, the way I do this is to sit down the night before, usually at the end of my working day, and I review my to do list. I find my frog, and I mark it with a big green F, so that I don’t even have to think about which task challenges me the most the next morning. This also helps because the you of the night before is further away from the you who’s going to actually have to do this task, and you’re likely to be way more honest about which is the real frog, rather than trying to sidestep it for something which is slightly less challenging.
So, yeah. Remove that Sword of Damocles which is hanging over your head (thank you Rocky Horror Picture Show, that’s gonna be stuck in my head all day now) day in and day out, as early as you possibly can, and then look back in a week, a month, six months and marvel at just how far you’ve come…
So, here’s my challenge to you — what’s your frog today, and can you eat it as soon as you finish reading this?