Many years ago, I read Brian Tracy’s book, Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time. I was surprised to see that I have never mentioned the book or the tactic in my published articles. I have certainly recommended that Thinking Labbers adopt the practice of “eating that frog.”

Tracy sums it up:

It has been said that 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.

 

Your “frog” is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it. It is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at the moment.

I have a more value-oriented approach to eating frogs. It’s fine if you start out thinking that doing your task is going to be a horrible experience. But take that aversion as the signal you need to rethink the “why” and “how” of this task so you are not focused on the expected horribleness of it. You have three levers that can make a huge difference in your motivation:

1) The rational selfishness of the task

2) The mental payoff of doing the task first

3) Your choice of the process used to perform the task

Leverage the rational selfishness of the task

You should only eat a frog if it is rationally selfish to do so. The horribleness of the task is not what puts it on the top of your agenda. There must be some redeeming value in it, which is the aforementioned “positive impact on your life and results” that caused you to declare it a “frog.” Your conscious awareness of the selfish values gained from doing this task is critical to making it palatable.

So don’t leave it at “I should do it.” “Should” just means that you have concluded that it is the rationally selfish thing to do. You need to know the selfish value explicitly and you need to keep it in mind. This is what people who donate kidneys to loved ones do. They are willing to take risks and endure significant pain to gain a value. The life of the loved one remains top of mind. As a result, they do not suffer unduly over it.

To see how this works in everyday life, consider this example: one of the Launchers needs to put together promotional packages for two of his direct reports. It is a chore he dreads because it is complicated, time consuming, and there’s a lot at stake. The first thing he needs to be clear on is why he selfishly wants to do this. Why does he care that these people get promoted? He does care, but he needs to make that “why” explicit. Why is it good for his career to get these done expeditiously? It is good, but he needs to be clear why. How will it make him more promotable? How will it be good on his resume? How will it make him a better manager? The answers to these questions need to be top of mind so that they are motivating corresponding emotions of desire, determination, eagerness, etc.

Similarly, if you are thinking, but “I have to do it,” you need to remember that you always have a choice — you may not like your choices, but you do have them. In such a case, you do need to make explicit to yourself why this is the rationally selfish choice. Otherwise, you activate a duty context or a victim context in which you feel like you have no control over your life or your success. This kills your ability to use the 2nd and 3rd levers to manage your motivation.

Leverage the mental payoff of doing the task first

It is true that eating that frog first can give you “the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.” But that is a weak way to express it.

Here are some payoffs you might get from doing it first:

• Momentum from accomplishing something important early in the day
• Pride in doing what you said you’d do
• Confidence you can tackle anything else
• Crow space freed up — you don’t have this task on your mind
• Better ability to concentrate on other tasks once it’s done
• Pride if you are breaking old habits of procrastination

I’m not suggesting you become a cheerleader or a pollyanna trying to reimagine the task as completely positive. It’s a frog, after all.

But there are real psychological benefits from doing it first and getting it done, and you need to keep those top of mind and get good at noticing them when they occur. Self-awareness of mental benefits gives you a huge amount of leverage in improving your overall quality of life.

This does not happen automatically. You need to monitor your mental state — both cognitive and affective — and learn how to exert selective focus to connect your values to your actual experience, so that these are not just theoretical benefits but actual experiences of pleasure as a result of doing the task first. Over time, this literally changes the structure of your value hierarchy to make these tasks more inviting. You learn to love doing the hard tasks.

Leverage your choice of the process used to perform the task

It’s also important to figure out why you’re predicting a horrible experience. Many times the horribleness comes from your expectations about how you will do the task, i.e., the process you expect to use.

If your expectation is that the only way to do this task is to pressure yourself with dire consequences if you don’t do it, or guilt yourself into it, or lash yourself for not doing it earlier until you are willing to do it to stop the self-criticism, you will make the experience horrible. But that is due to the approach you took, not due to the actual nature of the task.

For example, I’ve discussed the risk of pressuring yourself to do work and the need to create positive urgency through a “focus sprint” to avoid creating a vicious cycle and burnout.

Moreover, if this is a task that will take multiple work sessions, it is critical to create a virtuous cycle of momentum through a process of self-direction (as opposed to self-discipline). A process guided by self-direction may be uncomfortable and require significant effort especially at first, but it is not “horrible.”

There are other tactics, such as planned evolution, that ensure that you get something significant done in every two-hour block of time, so you have intermediate payoffs which make the process much more pleasant.

When you get clear on your power to adjust the process, you often discover that the “horribleness” of the task relates to some kind of “old baggage,” meaning something from your past experiences that creates a mistaken expectation of suffering, which does not vanish immediately when identified. In these cases, it turns out to be critical for your long-term happiness to attempt the task, experience the horribleness, and introspect where it is coming from so that you can find the underlying contradiction or conflict that is holding it in place. When you resolve such a conflict, you permanently reduce your long-term suffering.

Nearly all of the 50+ tactics and two dozen self-study courses in the Thinking Lab aim to show you ways to adjust your process to create a virtuous cycle of productivity, making any particular frog you need to eat regularly not just edible, but tasty and delicious.

The bottom line

Yes, you do need to eat frogs sometimes. And they can look pretty ugly.

If that’s the case, you owe it to your own happiness to make explicit — and/or create — a strongly selfish motivation for eating that frog. Make those values be the conscious driver of your action.

Over the long term, this makes the difference between having an apparently successful career that you hate versus having a truly successful career that you love. That is what I wish for you.

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What are your ways to eat a frog without suffering? I’m always curious to hear your thoughts.