# Eat the Frog: What It Means and How to Do It

URL: https://startr.online/eat-the-frog

> Eat the frog means doing your most important, most dreaded task first. Where the idea comes from, how to pick your frog, and what to do when it's too big.

**Guide · 7 min read**

# Eat the frog

What "eat the frog" means, where it comes from, how to pick your frog and what to do when the frog is so big that you avoid the whole morning.

By the Startr team · Published 25 October 2026

[English](https://startr.online/eat-the-frog)[Español](https://startr.online/es/comete-la-rana)[Português](https://startr.online/pt/coma-o-sapo)[Français](https://startr.online/fr/manger-la-grenouille)[Deutsch](https://startr.online/de/friss-den-frosch)[Italiano](https://startr.online/it/mangia-la-rana)[Polski](https://startr.online/pl/zjedz-zabe)[日本語](https://startr.online/ja/kaeru-wo-tabeyo)

**The short answer**

Eat the frog is a productivity method in which you do your most important and most dreaded task first thing in the day, before email and smaller jobs. The name comes from Brian Tracy's 2001 book _Eat That Frog!_, which built on an old saying about eating a live frog in the morning that is often credited to Mark Twain, though there's no evidence he said it. Once the hardest task is done, it stops hanging over the rest of the day. The method works best when the frog is one clear task. If it's so big that you avoid the whole morning, make the first bite a two-minute step.

## What does "eat the frog" mean?

"Eat the frog" means doing the task you're most likely to put off, and that matters most, before you do anything else. The frog is the thing you'd rather not think about: the report, the awkward phone call, the application form. Eating it first means it gets your freshest attention and doesn't sit at the back of your mind all day while you answer messages.

Two related pieces of advice usually come with it. If you have two frogs, eat the bigger one first. And don't spend long looking at the frog, because the longer you think about a task you dread, the worse it gets.

## Where the idea comes from

### Brian Tracy's book

The method was made popular by _Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time_, a short book by the business author Brian Tracy, first published by Berrett-Koehler in 2001. A third edition came out in 2017. Each of its 21 chapters covers one technique, and most of them are about choosing what to work on: writing down your goals, planning each day in advance, applying the 80/20 rule, thinking about the consequences of doing or not doing a task, ranking tasks by letter from A to E, and cutting big tasks into smaller slices. The frog ties them together. Once you know which task matters most, you do that one first and keep at it until it's done, which is the subject of the last chapter.

### The Mark Twain quote that probably isn't his

The saying behind the book is usually given as Mark Twain's: eat a live frog first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day. Quote Investigator, which traces the history of famous quotes, found no real evidence that Twain said it. The earliest known version comes from the French writer Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794), whose collected works, published around 1795, mention swallowing a toad every morning. The earliest link to Twain that Quote Investigator found was in a 1988 newspaper article, 78 years after Twain died (Quote Investigator, 2013).

## How to eat the frog, step by step

To eat the frog, you choose your hardest important task the evening before, write down its first small step, and start on it before you open email or messages the next morning.

1.  **The evening before, look at what's on tomorrow.** A list, a calendar or a scrap of paper all work.
2.  **Pick one frog.** The next section explains how.
3.  **Write its first bite.** One small action that starts with a verb, such as "open the grant form and fill in the project title".
4.  **Decide when and where.** "At 9:00, at the kitchen table." Plans that name a time and a place make people more likely to follow through (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006).
5.  **Leave the inbox closed until you've started.** Email is the classic way a morning disappears.
6.  **Take the first bite, then keep going.** Work on the frog until it's done or until the time you set aside runs out.
7.  **Count it.** If you worked on the frog first, the method did its job, even if the frog isn't finished.

## How to pick your frog

Your frog is the task that would make the biggest difference if you did it today and that you're most tempted to avoid. When two tasks compete, these questions help:

-   **Which one has the biggest consequences?** Tracy's book puts a lot of weight on this: what happens if it gets done, and what happens if it doesn't.
-   **Which one have you been moving from day to day?** That one is probably your frog.
-   **Can you make real progress on it in a morning?** Todoist's guide to the method suggests a frog of roughly one to four hours. If yours is bigger, the frog is the first part of it.
-   **Is it yours to do?** A task that's waiting on someone else can't be today's frog. Send the reminder and pick another.

## Examples of frogs with a smaller first bite

A frog is easier to start when you know exactly what the first bite is. These are common frogs and a first step for each that takes about two minutes.

| The frog | A smaller first bite |
| --- | --- |
| Finish the quarterly report | Open the report and write the heading for the first empty section. |
| Call the bank about a wrong charge | Find the bank's number and the date of the charge. |
| Write the grant application | Open the form and fill in your name and the project title. |
| Prepare for my performance review | Write down three things I finished this year. |
| Start the literature review | Open one paper and copy its title into my notes. |
| Reply to the difficult client email | Open the email and write the first line of a reply. |
| Clear out the spare room | Put one bag of things for donation by the front door. |
| Book the doctor's appointment | Open the clinic's booking page. |

If you can't think of a first bite, the free [first-step tool](https://startr.online/first-step) splits any task into parts and gives you a two-minute first step.

## When eating the frog backfires

Eating the frog backfires when the frog is so big or so vague that you can't face it, so instead of eating it first you avoid the whole morning. You sit down at 9:00 to "do the thesis", check your email "just for a second", and at 11:30 you're still tidying files. The method told you what to do first, but it didn't make the first move any easier.

The fix is to shrink the first bite until starting feels easy. "Write the thesis" becomes "open chapter 2 and write one rough sentence". That's the [two-minute rule](https://startr.online/two-minute-rule) used as an entry point to the frog: you still do the most important thing first, but you start with a piece of it that takes two minutes. Once you've begun, carrying on is usually much easier than starting was.

A few other situations where the method needs adjusting:

-   **You're not a morning person.** Eat the frog at the time of day when your head is clearest. "First" can mean the first thing in your best working block.
-   **Your morning isn't yours.** If you start the day with meetings or school runs, the frog goes in the first free slot. Putting it in your calendar helps, and the guide to [time blocking](https://startr.online/time-blocking) shows how.
-   **Every task feels like a frog.** When you're overwhelmed, choosing is part of the problem. Pick by a quick rule, such as the nearest deadline, and do only that one.

## Eat the frog vs the two-minute rule vs Pomodoro

These three methods answer different questions, so they combine well.

| Method | What it decides | Helps most when | Where it falls short |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Eat the frog | Which task comes first. | You spend whole days on small tasks and the important one never starts. | A frog that's too big can cost you the whole morning. |
| Two-minute rule | How small the first step is. | You can't make yourself start at all. | It doesn't say which task to start or when. |
| Pomodoro Technique | How long you work before a break. | You've started but drift off or run out of steam. | It doesn't help you choose the task, and 25 minutes can feel too long to begin. |

A day that uses all three looks like this: the frog is the report, the first bite is opening it and writing one sentence, and once you're going you continue in 25-minute rounds with a [Pomodoro timer](https://startr.online/pomodoro-timer). If you need a push for the very first second, the [5 second rule](https://startr.online/5-second-rule) adds a countdown before you move.

## Does eating the frog work?

There is little direct research on eating the frog as a method, but several findings point the same way. In Piers Steel's review of procrastination research, the more unpleasant a task felt, the more people put it off (Steel, 2007). A frog is unpleasant by definition, so leaving it until later gives you a whole day of reasons to keep postponing it.

People also tend to pick easy tasks first. A study of six years of data from a hospital emergency department found that when doctors were busier, they chose easier patients. That looked faster at first, but once the complexity of the work was taken into account, their output was worse, and choosing easy cases was linked to less learning (KC et al., 2020). In a different line of research, people hurried to finish easy parts of a task early even when it cost them extra effort, which the researchers put down to a wish to stop holding things in mind (Rosenbaum et al., 2014). Eating the frog is a deliberate way of working against that pull.

Choosing the frog the night before also matters. Deciding in advance when and where you'll start is one of the best-supported ways to follow through on a plan (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006). For more methods with research behind them, see the guide on [how to stop procrastinating](https://startr.online/how-to-stop-procrastinating).

## How Startr helps you eat the frog

Startr is built around a single frog. It asks you for the one thing you keep putting off and doesn't give you a to-do list to hide in. It then writes a first step that takes two minutes, and you pick a time and a place, such as 9:00 at your desk. At that time it counts down 3-2-1 and starts a 5-minute timer that can't be paused. When the timer ends you can add ten minutes or stop for the day.

## Questions people ask

### What does "eat the frog first" mean?

It means doing your most important and most dreaded task before anything else in your day. The idea is that once it's done, it stops weighing on you and the rest of the day feels easier.

### Did Mark Twain say "eat a live frog"?

Probably not. Quote Investigator found no real evidence that he did. The idea goes back to the French writer Nicolas Chamfort in the 18th century, and the first known link to Twain appeared in 1988.

### What if I have two frogs?

Eat the bigger one first. Once it's done, the smaller one will feel easier. If both feel too big to start, write a two-minute first step for the bigger one and begin there.

### What if my frog takes all day?

Then today's frog is the first part of it. Pick a piece you can make real progress on in a morning, and start it with a two-minute step.

**Try it on your own frog**

Startr is a procrastination app for the one thing you keep putting off. You type your frog, it writes a first step that takes two minutes, you pick a time and a place, and at that time it counts you down and starts a 5-minute timer. There's no sign-up, and the web app works on any phone or computer.

[Get my first step](https://app.startr.si)

## Sources

1.  Tracy, B. (2001). Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time. Berrett-Koehler. Third edition 2017.
2.  Quote Investigator (2013, April 3). Quote Origin: Eat a Live Frog Every Morning, and Nothing Worse Will Happen to You the Rest of the Day. [quoteinvestigator.com](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/03/eat-frog/)
3.  Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65–94. [doi:10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65](https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65)
4.  KC, D. S., Staats, B. R., Kouchaki, M. & Gino, F. (2020). Task selection and workload: A focus on completing easy tasks hurts performance. Management Science, 66(10), 4397–4416. [doi:10.1287/mnsc.2019.3419](https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2019.3419)
5.  Rosenbaum, D. A., Gong, L. & Potts, C. A. (2014). Pre-crastination: Hastening subgoal completion at the expense of extra physical effort. Psychological Science, 25(7), 1487–1496. [doi:10.1177/0956797614532657](https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614532657)
6.  Gollwitzer, P. M. & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. [doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1](https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601\(06\)38002-1)
7.  Todoist. What Is Eat the Frog? A Simple System for Productivity Minimalists. [todoist.com](https://www.todoist.com/productivity-methods/eat-the-frog)