Eat Your Frogs and Beat Procrastination
No, not literally frogs
Procrastination is one tough enemy to defeat, it takes your focus away, cuts your productivity and makes you set a new record for coffee breaks. You probably have been there. And with multitasking, social networks and information being bombarded into you, it is becoming even harder for procrastinators.
We all know the feeling, there is a big and boring task ahead of you, you are praying for that moment never come, and suddenly every little other task becomes important and must be done before the big one. You know this place. Tim Urban, on his brilliant Ted talk (linked below), calls this place “The Dark Playground”. You know you are in the Dark Playground when you are avoiding your main task by doing other not so important, nor painful, tasks. You clean your room instead of studying, organize your email instead of starting the project… You get the picture. You balance the guilty of not completing your job with the small sense of pride of completing small chores.
So, how can we escape the Dark Playground, stop procrastinating and get things done? Eat your frogs, daily.
“If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.” — Mark Twain
Eat your frog
The frog is just a metaphor for your most difficult and painful task. The one we tend to procrastinate. You need to get it done as soon as you can, or set a moment and don’t postpone it. We suffer by anticipation, and when you start the task quickly, you minimize the worrying, and many times you will see that the frog was not that big.
Eating your frog should not take more than half your day, if a task is too big, then you can just take the first step
How to spot your frog
We all have frogs in our lives, and probably more than one, maybe in our jobs, maybe in our houses and we tend to avoid them. Mark Twain said that if we have to eat more than one frog, we should start with the biggest one. I disagree, you should with the ugliest one. It’s a subtle difference, but sometimes our biggest frog is not the most difficult. For example, my biggest frog may be a big spreadsheet my boss asked, but the ugliest is a constructive and difficult feedback for a colleague that I have been postponing for days.
The strategy I use to spot my frogs, and identify the ugliest, is that I picture myself performing all my tasks, and see which made me flinch while I was imagining. What chores made you feel worse, and which you tried to give yourself excuses like “it’s not that important” or “that can surely wait a little”. These are your ugliest frogs, and the ones you should eat right away to avoid procrastination.
Do it daily and make it a habit
Humans are habit creatures, for bad and for good. Eat a chocolate a day after dinner, and you will miss it when you stop. Or you can start to run every morning, and after some weeks, it will feel nothing but natural to wake up early and exercise. So the best course of action to diminish procrastination is to make eating frogs a habit.
Most articles and authors state that you should do it the first thing in the morning (even Mark Twain), but personally, I do it after lunch. It is not a magical hour of the day, nor there is a scientific explanation, it is only the moment that I am most productive. So if you are like most people, more productive in the morning, that is when you frog appointment must be marked. But truly, you can set it any time, given two rules: You won’t skip it, and you will have enough time to finish your meal.
Don’t underestimate yourself, we all have a infinity creativity when it comes to postponing and procrastinating.
As an authentic procrastinator, I relate to the struggle of performing unwanted tasks. The best way out of it is to deprive ourselves of any possibility of excuse, and make our painful progress a daily obligation. Sooner rather than later, the habit of eating a frog gives a positive change to our productivity and can shorten our stay on the Dark Playground.
Tim Urban’s Ted Talk on procrastination: