Start with the easy part

The popular productivity technique called “Eat the Frog” encourages you to try starting your day with the thing you least want to do.

In principle, this sounds great. There’s an desirable grittiness to it.

In practice, I think it can totally work against you.

Let’s say you follow this advice — you declare that you’re going to do the thing you really don’t want to do first thing.

But then the day starts, you think about it, you think about the reason you don’t really want to do it, you put it off for just a little bit longer, and before you know it half the day is gone and you haven’t really accomplished anything.

The problem with saying you must do the hard thing first before you do anything else is that your ability to do anything else meaningful is contingent on you managing to do the hard thing.

Some days it just isn’t happening which means… nothing else is happening.

Here’s an alternative that I find works much better:

Do the thing that feels the easiest — it could be as simple as responding to a colleague. It could still be the thing you don’t want to do, but the easiest part of it.

I find that just starting with anything makes a big difference. It will help propel you to the next thing and the next thing after that.

By the time you need to do the hard thing, you have all this momentum behind you.