Eat the frog technique

You've heard of biting the bullet! Today we're going to tell you all about eating frogs! Well, not really, but the premise behind the focus technique is relatively simple. If you do away with your biggest challenges at the beginning of your day, the rest of your tasks, by comparison, will be a breeze.

""Eat a live frog first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.""- Mark Twain.

How does it work?

Tackle your most important and challenging tasks at the start of your work day. This will reduce the amount of procrastination, the mentality being that you have already done the more complicated stuff, so whatever other work you have will be a cakewalk.

When we are overwhelmed with work, we tend to do one of two things: Keep pushing the more significant tasks away until they're too big to push or ignore.

The other option is to while away your time by doing the smaller ""annoying"" tasks just to be done with them.

Ultimately none of these ""solutions"" are real solutions. In fact, they will likely keep you afloat until the next day instead of pushing you and your goals forward.

How to use it?

• Get very clear on your main objective. What do you most want to accomplish? (State your most important performance metrics.)
• Note your objectives. (Perhaps try using a task management program like the Pomodoro app available on Android IOS and Chrome)
• Fix a due date.
• List all the steps you must take to accomplish your goal.
• Put that list back in priority order. What are the first items? These are the frogs mentioned above.
• Take action right away! If you have more than one frog, start eating the most unsightly one. Please do it now!
• Make a commitment to taking action daily to advance your goal. It should be your very first task when you wake up. You'll have made the actual effort toward what's most crucial. That way, come hell or high water, you have already reduced your load.

What are the advantages of taking on a frog each morning? You'll be directing your best efforts toward only the tasks of the highest value because that is the time of day when most people are most productive.

How to prioritize your frogs?

The ABCDE method is a great way to identify your frogs. It works as shown below:

A: A task that must be completed to avoid serious repercussions. Your life's frogs are represented by these A tasks.

B: A task that needs to be completed but whose failure has relatively minor repercussions. Even if it might make someone uncomfortable or inconvenience them, an A task is more crucial.

C: An action that would be good but has no negative repercussions.

D: A task you can hand off to someone else, giving you more time for jobs in the A bracket.

E: Something you can completely get rid of without any actual repercussions.

From eating frogs to biting bullets, a business can be pretty violent and disgusting 😂.
If you are looking to enhance your productivity, then check out our Focus Mats and try these techniques with it to organize your workflow.