• Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

iMastery Productivity Training and Time Management Workshops

Productivity Training and Time Management Workshops for increased work focus and efficiency

  • Home
  • About iMastery
  • Workshops
    • Better Ways of Working
    • Foundations of Management and Leadership
    • Strategies for Mastering Distractions & Getting Things Done
    • How to Delegate
    • Interviewing and Hiring Techniques for Managers
  • Blog
    • How the ultimate lunch break can supercharge your workday
    • The Power of Pondering
    • Why meaningful check-in conversations matter
    • What’s the fuss about gratitude and does it belong in the workplace?
    • Work From Home COVID19 – What’s Really Happening?
    • 7 Tips for Optimising Your Focus in Uncertain Times
    • Leader as Coach: the benefits of asking great questions and the limitations of telling
    • How Understanding Your Values Can Propel You Toward High Performance & Personal Fulfilment
    • The Benefit of Walking Meetings
    • You Snooze, You Win
    • Master Your Email Inbox
    • Could You Delegate More Effectively?
    • Can Inbox Zero & Inbox Infinity Coexist?
    • Fantastical syncs your Tasks to your iPhone
    • How to excel at work and enjoy being on top of your game
    • 7 Things You Can Do Right Now for Effective Meeting Management
    • How to Get Difficult Tasks Done – Eat That Frog
    • What’s on your Productivity Go -To list?
    • Rules of Engagement for Effective Email Communication
    • How to create clear and sustained focus
    • 7 Productivity Tips to Improve Your Work Life Balance
    • How to Stop Checking Emails, Stop Multitasking, Work Smarter and Save Time
    • How a Productivity Check-Up Can Improve Your Work/Life Balance
  • Resources
  • Contact Us
  • e-Learning Modules
You are here: Home / Blog / How to Get Difficult Tasks Done – Eat That Frog

June 12, 2018 By Wendy Cole

How to Get Difficult Tasks Done – Eat That Frog

How-to-get-difficult-tasks-done-at-work
Eat That Frog Strategy Photo by Jonathan Youssef on Unsplash

If you have attended one of my workshops you’ve most likely received a dark chocolate frog. I readily give them away as the Eat That Frog strategy is one of my favourite hacks on how to get difficult tasks done and feel on top of my game!

What does Eat That Frog mean?

Eat That Frog is synonymous with accomplishing (eating) an important task (frog) early in the day. The frog is the important task on our to-do list that we are most likely to procrastinate on.

Might seem hard to believe, but eating our frogs is energising! The momentum, sense of satisfaction and self-mastery that accomplishing an important task generates, carries over to completing other tasks and sets up our day for success.

There seems to be some debate as to who first coined the phrase Eat That Frog. Brian Tracy certainly helped to popularise the saying by titling his book about overcoming procrastination, “Eat That Frog!”

Mark Twain is cited as saying:

“If the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.”

Why is Eat That Frog a masterful strategy?

By accomplishing the most important task for the day (the one we are most likely to procrastinate on), we’ve removed the stress and fatigue that would have come from not completing the task, as William James says, “There’s nothing so fatiguing as the uncompleted task”.

In addition, the momentum created from accomplishing an important task builds further momentum and is an empowering psychology as we have exercised self-discipline and self-belief.

How to Eat That Frog and maximise your day

So how do we do it? Underpinning the Eat That Frog strategy is clarity and planning. An all-encompassing prioritised to-do list certainly helps, as does identifying the frog the night before, and ensuring you have the necessary resources to complete the task. For example, if my frog is to amend a budget, I want to ensure that I have the Excel file saved and ready to update, along with any associated data.

We also need the time, space and attention to get the task done. Which means we need to be in a workspace that’s relatively free from external distractions, with time to fully concentrate on the task before we head into our meetings for the day and/or have our attention derailed by new message alerts. If completing the task will require more than 90 minutes it might be useful to break the task into smaller components and tackle them over a couple of days.

Quarantining time first thing in the day to accomplish our most important task is critical to the Eat That Frog strategy. Consider how you might stack your meetings together; starting late morning, or even better, in the afternoon.

A recent study has confirmed (what many of us intuitively understand), that when we have meetings spread across the day, we are less likely to engage in relatively extended (though feasible) tasks and end up spending time distracted by email and doing less important things.

Why it is important to Eat That Frog in the morning

Earlier in the day we’re likely to have more energy, a clearer mind and more willpower supporting us to take action and stay focused. The people around us also tend to be more patient in the morning; though it is wise to communicate to our team how long we intend to be offline eating frogs (1–2 hours can be a good time frame to begin).

But what if I’m not a morning person? In that case, the Eat That Frog strategy might be even more effective! Harness your energy at the end of the day to plan, prioritise and take a bite of your frog. The Zeikarnik effect will then work to your favour and see you utilise your mornings too.

Make it habit to Eat That Frog

The compounding effect of completing our most important task each morning is a total game changer. When we feel the satisfaction of accomplishing a task our body releases dopamine, which can see you accomplishing a higher level of productivity for the rest of the day.

So what are you waiting for? Eat that Frog!

Further tips on concentrating while using the Eat That Frog strategy

You can read more helpful tips about staying focused on work tasks in these articles about managing a full email inbox and improving work-life balance.

Filed Under: Blog

Footer

Contact Us

Located:
Level 3/80 Dorcas St Southbank VIC 3006

Phone: +61 419 366 624

Key Facilitator

Hi! I'm Wendy Cole, the founding director and key facilitator of iMastery.

There are a number of ways I assist companies ..... Read More…

Connect With Us

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Copyright 2016 - 2020 iMastery © | Home | Privacy Policy | XML sitemap