The Eat That Frog Method: How to Do Your Most Important Task First
"Eat that frog" means doing your most important, most dreaded task first, before anything else. The idea comes from a saying often attributed to Mark Twain: if you have to eat a live frog, do it first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day. Brian Tracy built a whole productivity book around it, Eat That Frog!, first published in 2001.
The method is simple to describe and surprisingly hard to practise, because the frog is exactly the task we are best at avoiding. This guide explains how to pick your frog, a daily routine that makes it stick, common mistakes, how it compares with other methods, and how to follow it in the Frog app.
What counts as your frog?
Your frog is the task that matters most for your goals and that you are most likely to put off. It is usually:
- Important: finishing it makes a real difference, such as a report, an application or a hard conversation.
- Uncomfortable or large: it feels difficult, unclear or boring, so other tasks keep jumping ahead of it.
- Yours to do: you cannot simply delegate it away.
Answering email, tidying the desk and other quick wins are rarely frogs, even though they feel productive.
Picking the frog with the ABCDE method
Eat That Frog suggests a quick way to rank your list. Go through each task and give it a letter:
- A: must do. Serious consequences if it is not done.
- B: should do. Mild consequences.
- C: nice to do. No real consequences.
- D: delegate. Someone else can do it.
- E: eliminate. It does not need doing at all.
If you have several A tasks, number them A1, A2 and so on. A1 is your frog. Never start a B task while an A task is waiting.
A daily Eat That Frog routine
- The evening before, list tomorrow's tasks and pick one frog.
- Break the frog into a first concrete step if it is large, such as "write the outline" rather than "write the report".
- Estimate how long it will take, so you can block that time.
- Start the day with the frog, before email, messages or meetings if you can.
- Work on it until it is done or the time block ends, without switching to easier tasks.
- Mark it done, then move on to the rest of the list.
- At the end of the week, count how many frogs you finished and how many slipped.
Common mistakes
Choosing too many frogs
If everything is a frog, nothing is. Pick one per day, two at most.
Picking a frog that is too big
"Finish the thesis" cannot be eaten in a morning. Choose a chunk you can realistically complete, and make the next chunk tomorrow's frog.
Warming up with small tasks first
A few minutes on email easily becomes an hour. The point of the method is that the frog comes before the warm-up.
Ignoring your energy
"First thing" works best if the morning is when you think most clearly. If your best hours are later, protect those hours for the frog instead.
How it compares with other methods
Eat That Frog is a rule about order: hardest important task first. It pairs well with other methods rather than replacing them.
- Eisenhower matrix: sorts tasks by urgency and importance. Good for deciding what matters; your frog will usually come from the important quadrants. See Eisenhower matrix examples.
- Time blocking: schedules tasks into the calendar. Useful for protecting a block for the frog.
- Pomodoro: works in short timed intervals. A good way to start a frog you are dreading.
- Paper to-do list: perfectly fine for this method. Circle or star the frog and write it at the top. You lose automatic counts and repeating tasks.
Using the Eat That Frog method in the Frog app
Frog treats every high-priority task as a frog and keeps count of the ones you finish.
- Press the round add button, enter a title and optional description, and set the due date and time.
- Set the priority to high to make it a frog. Medium and low are for everything else.
- Enter the estimated hours and minutes so you can see how much work is waiting.
- Add tags, notes or a repeat (daily, weekdays, weekly or monthly) if useful.
- In Settings, set how many frogs you aim to eat per day and per week.
- On the Active tab, sort by priority so the frog sits at the top, and tick it when it is done.
- Open the analytics screen to see completion rate, frogs eaten, pending frogs and overdue tasks.
The web version keeps your list in your browser, with no account. The iPhone and Android apps add deadline notifications and a daily reminder.
Frequently asked questions
What does "eat the frog" mean?
Do your most important and most dreaded task first, before easier work, so it does not get pushed back all day.
Who created the Eat That Frog method?
Brian Tracy popularised it in his book Eat That Frog!, based on a saying often attributed to Mark Twain.
How many frogs should I have each day?
One is the usual recommendation. On a light day you might manage two.
What if my frog is too big to finish in one go?
Break it into chunks and make one chunk today's frog.
How does the Frog app decide what is a frog?
Any task set to high priority counts as a frog. Completed ones count as frogs eaten; unfinished ones as pending frogs.