Eat the frog: why it’s good to do the difficult thing first

No one enjoys eating a witchetty grub.

The British reality TV show I’m A Celebrity.. Get Me Out of Here! features an assortment of (almost) famous folks roughing it in the Australian rainforest, and subjected to various gruesome trials in order to earn food for the rest of their campmates.

These ordeals vary, but one is repeated in some form, every series: the eating of live insects, often accompanied by raw eyeballs, or the intimate parts of animals. (Kangaroo anus, anyone?) 

Every year, the response is the same. Smarter contestants barely look at the ‘meal’ in front of them. They listen to the rules, and work out the minimum they need to swallow in order to win food for their companions. Then they just do it, as quickly as possible, with as little chewing as they can get away with. The ordeal is over in seconds. 

Then there are the ones who look closely at what’s on the plate, pause and think about it. They tend to eat more far slowly, gagging and squealing and creating fuss and drama.

This makes much better TV, but it also delivers a valuable lesson, for those of us who make a living without having to ingest live ants and crickets. Delaying doing something unpleasant only prolongs the agony. 

Eat that frog

Anticipation of doing something we really don’t want to do is almost always worse than actually doing it. The more we think about something – the more opportunity we give ourselves to consider how disgusting, difficult, and downright tedious the task in front of us is going to be – the longer we’ll put off doing it. And the more we’ll suffer.

Mark Twain knew this, long before television had been thought of, let alone torturing C-list actors, former glamour models, politicians and reality stars for entertainment. “If you know you have to swallow a frog,” he said, “swallow it first thing in the morning. If there are two frogs, swallow the big one first.”

The metaphor has been repeated by productivity gurus ever since, and gave a title to Brian Tracy’s best-seller, Eat That Frog! Get More of The Important Things Done – Today. And yet.. we don’t always do it. 

Which creates a new challenge.

That frog gets more disgusting, and seems to grow bigger, the more you look at it. The time it takes to complete the task itself doesn’t necessarily change. But the dread keeps growing, the longer you leave it. And it’s draining. Avoiding doing something can take up much more energy than actually doing it. 

• An email or phone call that feels difficult on Monday morning will, if delayed until Friday afternoon, start to feel like you’re triggering World War 3.

• That pile of paperwork you put on the floor will keep catching your eye all day/week/month, and by the time you actually start on it, it will feel like a mountain. (If you’re anything like me, it will also be covered in footprints and coffee spills by then.)

• The exercise you’ve been avoiding all day? It’s not going to be more fun in the dark, after dinner.

Doing the hardest thing first makes your day go better. Pretty much everything you have to do for the rest of the day will feel easier, lighter in comparison. 

Get into the habit of doing this, and you’ll start to catch problems while they’re small, before they get chance to grow. You’ll also reduce the drag of growing dread.

There will always be frogs.

That’s life.  But it’s much easier to digest a little one, or to gather together a lot of little ones and do them, in one difficult but satisfying block.

For me, a giant frog is always my annual accounts. Every year, I’d view to do them at the end of the UK tax year, on April 1. Every year, I delay and delay until the end of the following January, when I’d put in long hours processing yellowing receipts and dog-eared paperwork, and pay my long-suffering accountant extra to file my tax return hours before the January 31 deadline.

A few years back, I finally decided to end this torture. I vowed get up-to-date with my accounts in March, then file the final few receipts and invoices early April. My tax return would be filed early. I’d know exactly how much tax I needed to pay the following year. And life would be far less stressful.

You know what happened next, of course. It sat on my daily task list, for the whole of March. It was still there in April, draining my energy every time I noticed it. In May, I finally realised that this would last all year, unless I just cleared the time to do it. 

So I swallowed my frog. 

I blocked out the time on my calendar, and when the day came, I put on some good music. And I opened the Drawer of Doom, where all the receipts and paperwork had piled up. 

It took me exactly five hours and 22 minutes to clear that overstuffed drawer completely. I know, because I timed it. 

Had I left it until winter as usual, it would have taken far longer. By then I would have forgotten what some receipts were for. Complications that were simple to unravel while the circumstances were fresh in my mind would have taken far longer to sort.

Afterwards, while enjoying a celebratory glass of wine, I considered how to stop this particular frog growing quite so big and warty, next year.

I’ve added a one-hour financial admin block to my calendar every two weeks, time I use to issue and chase invoices, write up my accounts, pay bills, renew insurances, and do all the other tedious money stuff I used to avoid. My business is fairly simple, so it doesn’t make sense to hire a book-keeper. But over time, I’ve evolved a check-list and a routine that gets it all done, quickly and painlessly.

My tax return is now the first one my accountant files, every year. I know how much I’m earning, exactly how my cash is (or is not) flowing. The relief has been tremendous.

How to eat your own frogs (or witchetty grubs)

If there are projects and tasks that have been lingering for a while, take some time out and do an audit. There might be a reason you’re delaying.

1. The frog is simply too big to swallow in one go

If a task or project remains on your to-do list for months on end, it may be that it’s simply too overwhelming. Try breaking it down into smaller, actionable steps and working out how much time it will take to do each one.

Then, instead of some vague, enormous project like ‘Write article on frogs’, you’ll have specific tasks such as ‘Research difference between frogs and toads’ (1 hour) or ‘Call London Zoo press office to set up interview with amphibian keeper’ (15 minutes).

Estimating the time makes it easier to slot tasks into your schedule. It also and gives you some sense of how long it will take to actually complete the whole project. 

2. It’s not your frog to eat

If a project has been hanging over you for too long, set aside some time to assess it. Why exactly are you doing it? If there are lots of words like ‘should’ and ‘must’ in your reply, consider if you really need to do it at all.

Could someone else do it better? Is it something you’re doing because of other people’s expectations?  Could you just drop it, creating space to do something that genuinely excites you?

3. You need a recipe 

I’m straining the frog-eating metaphor to breaking point here, but bear with me a moment. Sometimes we simply don’t have the information or the skills we need to complete a task. 

With me, this tends to happen with tech issues. I had an item on my to-list for months which said: ‘Fix email on iPad’. And every time I read it, I felt paralysed. Eventually (doh!), I simply changed it to: ‘Research why I can receive but not send email from my iPad.’

It took 20 minutes to find a YouTube video that successfully addressed a problem that had bugged me since buying the device last year. And the biggest swallow I really had to do was my pride.

So what’s your frog for today? And when will you eat it?

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