19th November 2023
There’s a saying in the productivity community that you should “eat your frogs first”. Far from being culinary advice, it means to start your day by tackling the hardest item on your todo list first. The thinking is that with that task behind you it will be downhill from there, that everything else will be easy. There’s just one problem with this; eating frogs sucks.
Maybe there’s a good reason you’re struggling with a particular task; it could be in an area you’re not familiar with and you need to do some research first. It could be a complicated, thorny problem and you aren’t sure yet how to proceed. Eating your frogs first means front-loading your todo list with resistance and setting yourself up for failure.
That’s why I’m giving you permission to have some of your pudding first, just to get things moving. Harder tasks are easier to tackle once you have some momentum, when the wind is in your sails. Scratching a couple of jobs off your todo lists, even smaller ones, can boost your confidence and get the wheels rolling.
So go ahead and have a couple of mouthfuls of pudding, save your frogs for later.