Eat the frog

Eat the frog means you do the task you least want to do before you do anything else. The “frog” is one task. It matters a lot, and you keep putting it off.

Here is an example. Ben has five things on his list for tomorrow: write the report for Thursday’s meeting, answer email, book the dentist, order printer paper and update the team calendar. The report is his frog. His manager is waiting for it, and he has already put it off twice.

If Ben starts with the four easy ones, the morning goes to small things and the report waits another day. If he writes the report first, the hardest part of his day is over by mid-morning.

To eat the frog tomorrow morning, choose it tonight. Then you do not have to decide anything in the morning.

1. Write tomorrow’s tasks down tonight. Five or six lines are enough.
2. Pick the frog. Ask two questions. Which task matters most? Which one am I most likely to put off? If the answers differ, take the one that matters most.
3. Give it a start time and a place. Put it in one line, such as “At 9:00 AM, at my desk, I write the first heading of the report”.
4. Set it up before you go to bed. Leave the file open on the screen, or the papers on the table.
5. Start it before email, messages and news. Work on it for the time you planned, or until it is done. Ben starts at 9:00 AM and opens his email at 10:00 AM.

On five mornings, that gives Ben’s hardest work five hours a week. If starting is the hard part for you, see how to stop procrastinating.

Eat the frog comes from the book Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy, now in its fourth edition. In his own account of the idea, the frog is your biggest and most important task, and you work on it first thing each morning.

The saying behind the title is older. It goes roughly like this: eat a live frog first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you all day. Brian Tracy credits it to Mark Twain. The website Quote Investigator found no good evidence that Twain said or wrote it, and traces it to the French writer Nicolas Chamfort, in the 1790s.

This page gives the main idea in our own words, and is not connected to Brian Tracy or his publisher.

Eating the frog has some support from research. One set of experiments tested it directly.

People who did the hardest round first felt more capable afterward.

In a set of experiments, people did three rounds of puzzles, from the hardest round to the easy one or the other way around. Most people guessed beforehand that starting easy would make them feel more capable. The opposite happened: those who did the hardest round first felt more capable at the end (Habbert and Schroeder, 2020). In one of the experiments the order made no real difference. And the puzzle scores were about the same either way, so the study shows how people felt, not how much they got done.

A plan with a time and a place gets done more often.

Giving the frog a start time has support too. In a review of many experiments, people who planned when and where they would act did better at reaching their goals.

Every fact on this page links to a source below. We read each one in full, except the review of plans, where we read the authors’ summary. Ben and his list are made up.

1. Brian Tracy International (read October 13, 2026). Eat That Frog: Brian Tracy Explains the Truth About Frogs.
2. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, listed by Penguin Random House (read October 13, 2026). Eat That Frog!, Fourth Edition, by Brian Tracy.
3. Quote Investigator, April 3, 2013, updated February 22, 2025 (read October 13, 2026). Quote Origin: Eat a Live Frog Every Morning, and Nothing Worse Will Happen to You the Rest of the Day.
4. Habbert, R. and Schroeder, J. (2020). To build efficacy, eat the frog first: People misunderstand how the difficulty-ordering of tasks influences efficacy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 91, 104032.
5. Gollwitzer, P. M. and Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69 to 119.