Boost your productivity with the Eat That Frog technique! Learn how to prioritize tasks, overcome procrastination, and achieve your goals with this simple yet powerful approach.
Many individuals, especially young ones, have a tendency to severely underestimate what they can accomplish in a day or a year. This, at the end of the day, is what holds them back as they tend to overthink at times, procrastinate or, simply, do not feel like devoting themselves towards work. Rather than going gung ho into projects with a lot of encouragement and motivation, people instead get easily distracted or take their own sweet time to start working.
A change around this wouldn’t be necessarily hard as all it would take is a change in people’s mindsets – typically, if they start working without worrying too much about the outcome, they would be able to achieve a lot. Unfortunately, many people fall into the same gaping chasm of sloth, saying that they are “going to do the work” but never actually doing it.
One powerful method to overcome this is the well-known Eat the Frog technique. The focus of this technique is that the very first thing done in the morning is the hard and most vital alarming tasks. The saying “eat the frog” basically implies that should there be an immense task that needs to be done, that task should at least be the very first one in the morning when a person still has the high amount of focus and energy to complete it.
This technique’s origin can be traced back to a famous quote which goes thus, “If you have to eat a frog, we recommend doing this early. And if you have to eat two frogs, we recommend eating the largest one first.” Here frog is the most difficult task or the one that you are most constructively avoiding. The point is quite obvious – Just get over and done with the hardest or the most important task and everything else will feel like a breeze.
How to Use the Eat the Frog Technique Effectively
To position this productivity method for effective adoption, follow the following steps:
Identify Your “Frog”
The first and most important step is clarifying what your “frog” is. Instead of increasing a long list of tasks, concentrate on the most vital aspect which should be completed. Perhaps it is marking a large task or attending an important event or something that has been lingering on your desk for quite a while. In identifying the tasks, we will be targeting the key result area so that the focus is not busy, but productive. This sense of importance helps in channeling the efforts in the right direction.
Putting Your Attention on The Frog
Now that you have successfully figured out your frog, the next step is putting it right at the top of your to-do list. This means that when you wake up the next day, you should make it your point to deal with this task before any other important tasks come in the way. This reaffirms the fact that as you set out to start your day, you are able to complete the important tasks first, thereby paving a way for the longer goals in your life.
Eating your Frog Right After Waking Up
If you have a specific morning task in your schedule, waking up on time should be your very first ambition of the day. You may be tempted to check emails or social media but it isn’t very useful for you. Instead, ignore those distractions and redirect all your attention to the work to get it done. For instance, if you have exams the next day, you can study the entire day before that or at least in the morning. By making it a point to complete such tasks immediately after waking up, you avoid the distractions of the day that tend to build and accumulate. Thereby, saving time and energy.
Organize into Smaller Achievable Goals
It is very evident that big projects can be really challenging and this is the reason why it becomes important to divide these large tasks into smaller sub-tasks. That is, rather than taking on a monumental challenge in its entirety, it is more advisable to break it down into smaller components. For example, say, you are about to take an exam – do not study all the material in one go. Instead, try to divide this material into fewer parts, and dedicate yourself to one of them at a time. In this way, you will not lose control and won’t have to feel as anxious.
Place Concentration On The Task And Block Out Every Other Thing
The moment you’ve taken an action and focused your attention and energy towards your assigned task, you are supposed to remain focused. An activity or anything that is in the vicinity and you risk losing concentration should best be avoided. Try to mute notifications, or, better yet, call for an off on email access, or, simply arrange your workstation in a way that you will be left alone when working. Remember, regularity comes first — the more uninterruptedly you manage to stay active on a task, the more progress you will see. You will be able to perform better in the difficult tasks due to a high level of comfort while tackling them.
Be Consistent in Order to Achieve Your Long-Term Goals
One thing that you should remember is that the most important factor that will help you achieve effective long-term productivity is willingness to be consistent. One should keep in mind that no matter the number of times you accomplish the task that is defined as eating the frog, you would still have to do it over and over again. Eating the frogs in the morning on a consistent basis will help you develop many good habits that are necessary in achieving success in the long run. Consequently, with every frog that you will eat, you will begin gaining confidence and improve in project management and starting and completing tasks.
The Advantages of the ‘Eat the Frog’ Strategy
It has been observed that the ‘Eat the Frog’ technique has become very popular for a number of reasons and applying it on a daily basis will reward you. First, find a difficult task and take it on in the morning. It can help you get early motivation and most importantly the feeling of getting things done. This forward-looking perspective leads to increased energy and focus on the remaining parts of the day. Furthermore, doing frequent hard tasks rather than waiting to complete them all at once helps decrease the chances of procrastination and anxiety that arise from having too many remaining tasks. While using this technique, one will begin to transform into a more disciplined, organised and efficient worker.
The effectiveness of the Eat the Frog technique is derived from its very straightforwardness. To utilise it, there is no need for sophisticated pedagogical approaches or fancy hardware. All it needs is to change one’s attitude and willingness to do what is necessary. Procrastination can be put in the past and goals can be reached much more efficiently when you take the time to think about what’s important and tackle that to-do list in order, starting with the most crucial items.
That said, if the technique of eating the frog is how you boost your focus levels and improve your productivity, then it all begins with tackling the hardest and the most important work first thing in the morning. In terms of implementing the change in an effective manner, it must be understood that concentration and regularity are essential. These practices take time, but eventually you will notice that you start being more productive and organised at work and in life as a whole.
