44 | Make sure to eat your frog 🐸
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
Hey friends,
I have a question for you. Out of everything that you want to (or should) do, what have you been procrastinating on lately?
On my end, I can think of a few things, like:
Planning for a creative project I want to unveil soon,
Working on my exercises for my Discrete Mathematics class,
Creating a new Notion template,
Working out,
Designing my portfolio,
Even writing this very newsletter 🤷🏾♂️
Now don’t get me wrong, I really really want to do all of these tasks... or do I?
Let’s not fool anyone; It’s not a lack of time which prevents me from getting to these tasks, but rather other reasons, like:
The fear of the time it will take,
The fear of the pain I might endure,
The fear of doing it wrong / wasting time.
Although I consider them to be important, I don’t deal with my fears and make these tasks a priority, so when push comes to shove, I just choose the comfortable way out: procrastinating.
Thankfully, there a few methods and rules I can apply when I really need to get things done. One of them is : Eating my frog every morning.
Why you should eat your frog every morning
There are some tasks that nobody wants to do. Boring and difficult tasks fit the criteria perfectly. No matter how important we know they are, we can’t get ourselves to work on them until it’s already (almost) too late.
A bit like eating a frog.
Nobody would eat it, unless they really had no other choice.
And ultimately, everyone has to 🤷🏾♂️
As Mark Twain says…
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.”
How to eat your frog
If you have to eat a frog, and you know there is no way out of this situation, then better do it once and for all.
Before going to sleep, choose a task (short to medium, which will take less than half a day to get done.
Only choose to focus on one task, the most annoying yet import task you have.
Get to it as soon as you start working. If possible, avoid distractions like email, social media or mindless browsing.
Just work and get things done. Focus on it as much as you can and picture yourself being free from it in a few hours.
Rince & repeat by focusing on your most important task the day after.
“No matter what you tell the world or tell yourself, your actions reveal your real values. Your actions show you what you actually want.” — Derek Sivers
Being both a perfectionist and a procrastinator, this rule help me fight a lot by instinct to postpone tasks. Days after days I realize that only rarely is the difficulty of the task the issue; most of the time, what we have to fight is our reluctance to get to work.
— What I loved this week
📰 What Is Eat the Frog? A Dead Simple System for Productivity Minimalists | Todoist
📰 Eat The Frogs First Thing in The Morning (And Other Better Work Habits) | by Thomas Oppong
🗣 Quote of the week: “Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.”
— Jame Clear (in Atomic Habits)
— What I created this week
Here is what I created for you lately.
Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor E. Frankl
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl’s dives into his own story as he experienced the horrors of the holocaust during the Second World War. Going through situations that most of us could never imagine made him realize what he considers to be Man’s strongest desire: to find meaning in life.
Hackatown 2021
This weekend I also had the opportunity to participate in Hackatown 2021 and start to build a tiny project with friends and learn about new technologies. We didn’t get to do as much as we planned, but it was still very fun!
That’s all from me for today, see you next week 👋🏾