Did you eat the frog?
I’ve heard: Bite the bullet. Grasp the nettle. Suck it up. Take one’s medicine. Swallow the pill. But here’s a new one: “Eat the frog”!
“The frog is that one thing you have on your to-do list that you have absolutely no motivation to do and that you’re most likely to procrastinate on. Eating the frog means to just do it, otherwise the frog will eat you meaning that you’ll end up procrastinating it the whole day. Once that one task is done, the rest of the day will be an easier ride and you will get both momentum and a sense of accomplishment at the beginning of your day.” —Stefano M., Noisli Blog
Lots of people equate procrastination to laziness; however, it’s quite the contrary. Fear and other self-sabotaging thoughts throw us off our productivity course. Fear of failure, fear of not being good enough, pressure to be perfect, or worrying about what’s next once you complete “it”. And so we push that fear out as far as possible.
One way to overcome that fear is to eat the frog! Tackle the hardest, (potentially) most disliked, most important task first thing in the morning.
And let’s be honest, the thought of eating a frog is extremely off putting…but I believe in the message and for the past couple weeks, before I even heard of the phrase, I’ve been tackling my biggest priority first thing in the morning and it’s really helped improve my overall productivity throughout the day.
So, here are a few questions to help you start to put this into practice:
What is my frog? What is that one thing I don’t want to do but I must?
Why am I putting it off? (And be honest with yourself! By acknowledging the emotions behind the procrastination you start to shift those emotions into a more positive, productive state.)
What is one thing I can do right now to move me closer to completion?
And if you’re still struggling tackling that thing, simply commit to working on it for just 5 minutes! You might surprise yourself at how far you get!
With love,
Caru xo
P.S. Here’s the rest of the article by Stefano M. if you’re interested in reading more about this productivity hack and additional tips to increase your productivity and stop procrastinating.