Concept
Eat the frog
Eating the frog is Brian Tracy's rule of order: identify the most important task of the day, the one with the largest consequences and the strongest pull to postpone, and do it first, before email and before anything easier, while willpower and clarity are highest.
The image comes from a line usually attributed to Mark Twain: eat a live frog first thing and nothing worse will happen all day. Tracy's point is about order rather than effort. A procrastinator does not decide once to avoid the important task; they decide it two hundred times a day, each time a smaller task offers itself as a reasonable alternative. Doing the frog first ends that negotiation before it begins, and spends the day's best hours on the work that matters instead of on the inbox. The frog is found with the 80/20 rule, since twenty percent of tasks produce eighty percent of the value and the frog is almost always among them, which is exactly why it is frightening. David Allen's next action sharpens it: the frog is not the project but its next concrete move.
A real-life example
An accountant in Bursa lets the demanding client's quarterly filing slide to the last two days every quarter while he answers email. The Tuesday it is the first thing on his desk at eight-thirty, before the inbox opens, it takes two hours instead of two days, and the email is exactly as urgent as it was.
How to use it
- 1Ask which task, done today, would make the biggest difference; that is the frog.
- 2Start it before the inbox opens; email is where frogs go to be forgotten.
- 3Make the frog a next action, not a project: the first concrete bite, not the whole thing.