Why I spend three minutes every morning eating frogs

(major productivity hack)

Every morning I sit down and plan the day.

This means writing down the five or six priorities that I will check off as I go through the day.

I noticed, over time, that I would often get frustrated at the growing number of tasks that kept showing up on a new list day after day.

The same things.

Often these were things like marketing my work, or writing, that I knew I needed to do daily…

But I still allowed a day to go by without doing it.

The guilt and annoyance of avoiding my important tasks — only to do what was either fun or seemingly urgent — would build inside me.

Over time, with more and more avoidance of the key tasks, my business contracted, and I had little substance to show for most days.

I needed a better system.

I needed to swallow that frog.

To quote the words of productivity maestro Brian Tracy, eating that frog means doing the most challenging and/or important tasks FIRST rather than doing what most of us do, focusing on the urgent (or procrastinate, or only do the easy stuff).