Eat the frog: does doing your hardest task first work?

There’s one job on your list that has already been moved to tomorrow about three times. And there’s a famous time management technique for exactly that job: eat the frog, which means doing your most important task, the one you’re most likely to put off, before anything else^[1]. The line behind it supposedly comes from Mark Twain, who is said to have told people to eat a live frog first thing every morning, because after that it’s “probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long”^[1].

And honestly, I never thought to question it. It’s supposedly Mark Twain, it’s about eating a frog, and it fits on a mug. The only problem is that there’s no good evidence Twain ever said it^[8]. (This one sits with the other time-and-focus questions on the Work page.)

So here’s what I’m going to argue: the frog comes with a famous author who probably never said it and a couple of reasons that sound a lot more solid than they are. And when somebody finally tested a version of it, doing the hard part first changed how people FEEL about their day. In the two closest studies I could find, people who did the hard part first felt more capable or less worn out, though neither, as far as I could tell, showed more work getting finished^{[3, 4]}.

The phrase got famous through author Brian Tracy and his book Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time, first published in 2001^{[1, 2]} (and people now say “eating the frog” in meetings as if that were a normal thing to say at work). On a page of time management tips on his website, he defines your frog as “your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it”, and says that if you have two, “eat the ugliest one first”^[1] (which is not a sentence I expected to find on a page about time management). For the wider picture on putting things off, see the long essay on how to stop procrastinating.

I’ll take it in the order the advice gets handed to you: first the quote, then the reasons people give for it, then the test of whether it helps you get things done. And we’ll start with Twain, because a quote with that famous a name on it should be easy to track down.

“And if he didn’t he should have”: Who really said “eat the frog”?

Probably not Mark Twain. The oldest version that Quote Investigator found is a French saying from around 1795, and it’s about swallowing a toad^[8].

Brian Tracy’s site says “Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that it is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long”, and names no source for it^[1]. Three of the top pages for this phrase credit Twain too^{[5, 6, 7]}. And with that many people agreeing, you’d expect the page where he wrote it to be easy to find. So somebody went looking.

That somebody was Quote Investigator, a site that traces famous lines back through old newspapers and books (which sounds like a very satisfying way to spend an afternoon). And it found “no substantive evidence that Mark Twain spoke or wrote the expression”^[8].

What it found was that French toad. Around 1795, a collection of Nicolas Chamfort’s work had a speaker named M. de Lassay advise swallowing a toad every morning, so that nothing would seem disgusting for the rest of a day spent in society^[8]. So the original toad had nothing to do with work. It was for getting through a day of other people. You swallow the toad at breakfast, and after that the dinner party can’t hurt you.

You swallow the toad at breakfast, and after that the dinner party can’t hurt you.

The frog turns up in 1896, in an essay by Émile Zola against literary critics. A London journal summed up his advice as learning “to swallow a live frog every morning before sitting down to your daily task”^[8]. So now it’s a frog, it’s alive, and there’s a daily task in the sentence. That has to be our to-do list advice, right? Aaand… no. Zola’s frog was the critics’ insults, which he read each morning to toughen himself^[8]. So this was a man who started his day by reading the worst things people had said about his work, on purpose, which today we’d just call checking the comments.

And Twain? His name shows up late. The first Twain link Quote Investigator shows is from 1988, when a Cleveland newspaper writer named Michael Heaton wrote this: “I think it was Mark Twain who said, and if he didn’t he should have, that if you swallowed a toad every morning you could be pretty sure that nothing worse would happen to you for the rest of the day. That’s why I jog”^[8]. So even the guy pinning it on Twain wasn’t sure, said so right there in the sentence, and then used it to explain his jogging. Twain had died in 1910^[8], so he wasn’t around to object. And all of that was in print thirteen years before Tracy’s book^{[2, 8]}.

The item from the next year is the one that surprised me. In 1989 a newspaper credited Twain with a two-frog version: “If you have to eat two frogs, don’t eat the smaller one first”^[8]. (So now we’re eating frogs, plural. Somebody looked at the one-frog advice and decided it needed a sequel.) That’s already a rule about order, twelve years before the book, and Quote Investigator calls the Twain link implausible^{[2, 8]}.

Figure 1How a toad for bad company became a frog for your to-do list

1. About 1795A collection of Chamfort’s work: swallow a toad every morning, so nothing seems disgusting for the rest of a day spent in society [8]
2. 1896Zola: a live frog every morning before your daily task, a picture of taking in the critics’ insults [8]
3. 1988A Cleveland newspaper writer: “I think it was Mark Twain who said, and if he didn’t he should have” [8]
4. 1989A two-frog version credited to Twain: “don’t eat the smaller one first” [8]
5. 2001Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog! first comes out [2]

So the famous name falls away. A rule can be useful whoever said it first, but it does mean the frog can’t lean on Twain anymore and has to stand on its reasons. And one reason you’ll hear is willpower.

Battery at 100%, allegedly: The idea that willpower is fullest in the morning

Is your willpower really fullest in the morning? The research behind that idea can’t tell you. Its famous finding came out close to zero or small when many labs repeated it, and those repeats never compared mornings with afternoons^{[10, 11, 12]}.

Here’s how the idea usually gets told. Flown, one of the top pages for this phrase, cites “groundbreaking research by Roy Baumeister in 1998” to say that “willpower is a limited resource”^[9]. And if that’s right, the morning makes obvious sense. You wake up with your mental energy at 100%, it drains all day, so you do the hard task first thing in the morning, before your inbox gets to it. (Tracy, on the pages I read, doesn’t make that claim^[1].)

So what was the groundbreaking research? Well, it’s the famous radish study. Baumeister and three colleagues had students skip a meal, and then some of them had to eat radishes while chocolates sat in view (which is honestly a mean thing to do to a student). Afterwards the radish group gave up sooner on puzzles that couldn’t be solved than the students who ate the chocolates or ate nothing^[10]. That study started the idea that willpower runs down like a fuel tank, but large repeats in many labs have found the effect is close to zero or small^{[10, 11, 12]} (motivation vs discipline). Decision fatigue, which is the same idea about choices, gets its own look.

And here’s the part that matters for the frog. None of those repeats compared mornings with afternoons, either^{[11, 12]}. So even if there is a tank, these studies can’t tell you what time of day it’s full.

OK, so forget the tank. Maybe people are just sharper in the morning anyway? Well, some of them are.

Speak for yourself: Morning people, evening people and the best time for the hard stuff

So is there one best time of day for the hard stuff? The research says not really: it depends whose morning it is, and whether you’re a morning person at all. A 2025 review by Chauhan and colleagues gathered the studies on chronotype, which is whether you lean toward being a morning or an evening person^[14]. So nobody ran a new experiment for this one. They collected the experiments other people had already run and counted how they came out.

And most of them found no overall difference in thinking between the two types^[14]. So morning people aren’t sharper across the board (sorry, 5am club). The more useful finding is about fit: in a bit under half of the studies of adults aged 18 to 45, people did better at the time of day that suited their own body clock, mostly on attention and memory^[14]. A bit under half isn’t nothing, but it isn’t a law of nature either. So the morning helps if it’s YOUR good time, and that is as far as this evidence goes.

If you work nights or rotating shifts, or your days start at a different hour each week, I’d read “first thing” as the start of your working day, whenever it falls. Nothing I read in these studies covered night or rotating shifts, so that one is only my reading.

So the clock half of the rule looks shaky. But the rule has another half, which is about order, and that’s the half somebody actually put to a test.

Expectation vs. reality: Does it help to eat the frog first, and where’s the proof the strategy works?

It seems to help with how the day feels, with no sign so far of more work getting finished. That’s where the two closest studies point^{[3, 4]}.

Tracy’s rule is also about order: the frog comes “before you do anything else”^[1]. No study I could find tests the rule exactly as he states it, but two come close, and one of them was aimed straight at the frog. In 2020, Rachel Habbert and Juliana Schroeder at the University of California, Berkeley, published a set of experiments under the title “To build efficacy, eat the frog first”^[3]. (They credited the saying to “Anonymous (a popular aphorism often attributed to Mark Twain)”^[3], so they were a lot more careful about it than the mugs are.)

First they asked people to guess. If you wanted to come out of a set of tasks feeling as capable as possible, which order would you pick, hardest first or easiest first? Most people chose easiest first^[3]. And that sounds sensible to me. You do the small tasks first, you get a little win, and then you go and fight the monster. I’d have picked it too.

Then they checked. They assigned people to an order at random, so nobody got to choose. In the clearest experiment, online adults did three rounds of analogy puzzles, hardest first, easiest first or a mix, and then rated how skilled and confident they felt^[3].

Turns out the majority had it backwards. On a scale of 1 to 10, the hardest-first group rated themselves 6.13 on average and the easiest-first group 4.62 (so about one and a half points apart), with the mixed group in between at 5.26^[3]. But the number of puzzles they got right didn’t differ^[3]. Same puzzles, same scores, and one group walked away feeling better about it.

Same puzzles, same scores, and one group walked away feeling better about it.

Figure 2How capable people felt after the same puzzles in a different order

Average rating of how skilled and confident they felt, from 1 to 10

Easiest first4.62

Mixed order5.26

Hardest first6.13

But why would so many people guess the wrong order? Well, the authors have an answer for that. They say that when people imagine a run of tasks, they picture the beginning of it more than the end^[3]. So when you imagine doing the most difficult task first, what you see is the struggle at the start, and you don’t really see how easy the last one is going to feel. Which is fair, because nobody daydreams about the easy part.

Now, their other experiments were less tidy. With word puzzles the effect showed up clearly only in larger follow-ups, and order made no difference to how people did in a later paid competition^[3]. And with job-application tasks it changed nothing, perhaps, the authors suggest, because those tasks gave no clear feedback^[3]. A puzzle has a right answer. A job application just sort of… ends, and then you wait. Hold on to that detail, because it comes back when we get to trying this.

Puzzles on a screen are one thing, though. What about an actual working day? Well, a 2025 study by Zhang and colleagues looked at whole workdays at two companies^{[4, 15]}. On days when employees did harder tasks early in the workday and easier ones later, they ended the day less tired and more mentally relaxed, and went the extra mile more often, for example by helping colleagues^{[4, 15]}. People the authors call early-pacers also felt they had made more progress^[4]. (There were EEG recordings involved too^[4], which means somebody agreed to have their brain waves measured for a study about what order they did their work in.)

So put the two side by side. More capable, less tired, more relaxed, and in one study more helpful to colleagues. Nearly all of that is about how the day feels, and that’s the part of the rule with the most behind it^{[3, 4]}. Neither study, as far as I could tell, showed people getting more DONE.

And there’s one more catch. Both studies put the hardest tasks first, and that isn’t quite how Brian Tracy says to prioritize, because his frog is your “most important task”^{[1, 3, 4]}. The most challenging task on your list and the most important one aren’t always the same thing (ask anyone who has spent a morning fighting a printer).

Feeling capable may matter for putting things off, too, though neither study tested whether any of this helps people overcome procrastination. Piers Steel’s 2007 review of the research on procrastination lists self-efficacy, the belief that you can complete the task in front of you, among the strong and consistent predictors of procrastination^[18].

So this is where I’ve landed. Eat the frog is worth a try, in my opinion, if you pick the frog by dread and not by the clock, and if what you expect from it is a lighter day and not a longer list of finished jobs. As a way to get more done? I found no study showing that the strategy works. As a way to stop carrying one job around in your head until 4pm, when you’re already tired, I think it’s looking pretty decent.

You can check your inbox after: One small way to try the frog method on your own procrastination

Here’s the small way to try the frog method: pick the one job you’d most like to postpone, cut a ten-minute slice off it, and do that slice before anything easy. (If, in your head, eating the frog means completing the whole job before you’re allowed to do anything else, no wonder it keeps getting moved to tomorrow. I’m asking for ten minutes.) So which job on your list would you least like to see first thing tomorrow? That’s probably your frog.

Remember the job-application tasks, where order changed nothing? My guess is that the frog fits best when the work shows you quickly how you’re doing, since the Berkeley effect didn’t appear for job-application tasks that gave no clear feedback^[3]. And for brand-new work, the authors suggest you may need to “start with the easiest task in order to learn how to complete it before tackling the hardest one”^[3]. So if it’s your first week with the new software, nobody is asking you to start with the scariest menu.

If you can’t start anything at all, that’s a different problem (What is task paralysis? Why starting feels impossible, with or without ADHD), and if putting things off is constant and making you miserable, your own doctor or a counselor is a better next step than any frog.

So here’s the small version. Tonight, or before your next shift, name your frog and cut a manageable slice of it, one that takes about ten minutes. Next time you start your day at work, do that slice before email or anything easy. At the end of the day, notice whether it got done and whether the day felt lighter or heavier than usual. And if ten minutes is too much, open the file the frog lives in, and let that count. Yes, really, opening the file counts.

If you’d like a proper test (and you’re the kind of person who enjoys a tally), there’s a fuller version. For seven days, draw a folded slip each evening from a pile of seven, four marked “frog first” and three “easy first”. Each night, note whether the slice got done and rate how tired you felt and how much progress the day felt like, from 1 to 5, then compare the two kinds of days. For frogs that turn out to be tiny jobs, see 2 minute rule: two productivity rules with one name, and which one fits you.

And if you forget, or the frog wins that day, it’s fine. The oldest version Quote Investigator found was a toad for surviving polite company, and it only later became a frog for a to-do list^[8]. So the old saying has changed jobs before, and it can bend to fit yours. Name your frog tonight, give it the first ten minutes tomorrow, and then go and check your email like you wanted to all along.

Judging a book by its cover (and its website): Is Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time worth reading?

I can’t tell you whether the book is worth reading, because this post is built on Brian Tracy’s website and the research, and I haven’t read the book. But I can tell you what’s on the cover and what’s on his website, which is already more of a paper trail than Mark Twain left us.

The full title is Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time, which is a lot to promise on one cover (stop procrastinating, get more done, AND take less time doing it). It was first published in 2001, and Open Library lists 60 editions of it^[2]. Quote Investigator, the site that went looking for Twain, quotes from a second edition from 2007, and the reader’s question it answers calls the book “a best-selling self-help book”^[8]; the Berkeley researchers call it “the best-selling motivation book”^[3]. So whatever else is true, it’s described as a bestseller, and a lot of people have bought the frog.

And what’s the advice itself? Well, on his website it comes down to two rules. The first is that you find your frog and tackle it “before you do anything else and without taking too much time to think about it”^[1] (which, to be fair, is exactly how I’d want to eat a frog). The second is for people who have more than one: “if you have two important tasks before you, start with the biggest, hardest, and most important task first”^[1].

What those two pages don’t have is a study. Neither of them cites any evidence for the rules^[1]. That doesn’t make the advice wrong, plenty of sensible advice shows up without a footnote. But it does mean the testing was left to other people, and you’ve already seen how that went: the closest studies link it to how the day feels; the lab study found no change in puzzle scores, and the workplace study didn’t count finished work^{[3, 4]}.

So if you like the idea and you’d enjoy 21 different ways of being told to get on with it, the book has clearly found its readers. And if you only wanted the one idea, you’ve got it now, and it was free. If you’d rather work in short timed bursts than frog-first, the Pomodoro technique is the other famous one. There are more everyday questions like this on the Work page.

A few more on how to spend the day:

• More from the Work page
• The Pomodoro technique: does it work?
• Is decision fatigue real?
• How to stop procrastinating, the long essay

No frogs were harmed in this section: Quick answers about the eat the frog method

How does the eat the frog technique work?

You pick your frog, which Brian Tracy defines as “your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it”^[1], and you do it before anything else. It’s time-management advice meant to stop procrastination on the one task that truly matters: that task goes first, usually early in the day, then you get on with the rest of your tasks. The idea is that the rest of your day feels easy by comparison (yes, even the spreadsheet).

Who should use the eat the frog technique?

It’s worth a try if one dreaded job waits all day and you want a lighter day, not a longer done list. The closest studies suggest the practice can help with how capable or tired people feel^{[3, 4]}. Whether it’ll boost productivity or help you stop procrastinating, I can’t promise: neither study tested procrastination, and the lab one found no change in puzzle scores^[3]. For a sense of accomplishment, the nearest finding is that doing the hardest puzzles first had a positive impact on how capable people felt^[3].

What are some tips for using the eat the frog technique?

Start smaller than the advice does: name the job you’re most likely to procrastinate on, cut a ten-minute slice of it, and do it before email and the small unimportant jobs. (The slice is my suggestion, not a finding.) You may have to find the best time for yourself, because one reason you’ll hear for the morning (that the day will drain your energy) rests on research that is shakier than it sounds^{[10, 11, 12]}. And if one of your other critical tasks has a deadline at noon, that goes first.

The numbers, if you want them

• The Berkeley studies. 60% chose easiest first in one experiment and 65.5% in another (so the warm-up crowd is a comfortable majority). In the analogy-puzzle experiment, 327 online adults rated themselves from 1 to 10: 6.13 after hardest first, 5.26 after a mix and 4.62 after easiest first, a medium-sized gap between hardest first and easiest first. With word puzzles, the first gap just missed the usual bar for a reliable result; three larger follow-ups with 1,149 people found it clearly^[3].
• The workday study. 392 employees: an experiment with 166 and several surveys a day for another 226^{[4, 15]}. I read only the abstract, so I can’t give effect sizes or say whether people were assigned at random. For steady or late pacers, the progress benefit was weaker^[4].
• The chronotype review. 65 studies; more than 80% found no overall difference. Matching your body clock helped in 29 of 64, and the abstract gives no average size^[14].
• The rest. In an emergency department, picking easier patients first was linked with less work done once case complexity was allowed for^[16]; at a debt-settlement firm, closing accounts, whatever their balance, was linked with getting out of debt^[17].
• How I searched. Four research databases turned up no study of the rule exactly as Tracy states it, and Twain sites turned up no Twain source. For Tracy I read his website, not the book.

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Sources

1. Tracy, B. “The truth about frogs” and “Time management tips”. briantracy.com (no dates shown). https://www.briantracy.com/blog/time-management/the-truth-about-frogs/ and https://www.briantracy.com/blog/time-management/time-management-tips/
2. Open Library record: Tracy, B. Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time. Berrett-Koehler, first published 2001. https://openlibrary.org/search.json?q=eat+that+frog+tracy
3. Habbert, R., & 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. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2020.104032
4. Zhang, C., Qiu, Z. (A.), Zhao, H. H., Yang, M., Chen, W., & Ma, Y. (2025). Harnessing the potential of workday design: The sequencing of task difficulty and its implications for workday well-being and performance. Personnel Psychology, 78(4), 545-570. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12685 (abstract read; full text paywalled)
5. Readingraphics, “Book Summary: Eat that Frog.” https://readingraphics.com/book-summary-eat-that-frog/
6. Lucid, “Why it’s important to ‘eat the frog’ and how to do it” (12 September 2023). https://lucid.co/blog/eat-the-frog
7. Professional Leadership Institute, “What Is The ‘Eat That Frog’ Productivity Strategy?” https://professionalleadershipinstitute.com/resources/eat-that-frog/
8. Quote Investigator (2013, updated 2025). Eat a live frog every morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/03/eat-frog/
9. Flown, “Eat the frog: What it means and how to apply this productivity tip” (25 October 2026). https://flown.com/blog/procrastination/eat-the-frog
10. Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1252-1265. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1252
11. Hagger, M. S., Chatzisarantis, N. L. D., Alberts, H., et al. (2016). A multilab preregistered replication of the ego-depletion effect. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(4), 546-573. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691616652873 (abstract read)
12. Vohs, K. D., Schmeichel, B. J., Lohmann, S., Gronau, Q. F., et al. (2021). A multisite preregistered paradigmatic test of the ego-depletion effect. Psychological Science, 32(10), 1566-1581. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797621989733 (abstract read)
13. Baumeister, R. F., & Vohs, K. D. (2016). Misguided effort with elusive implications. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(4), 574-575. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691616652878 (not read; its argument is known from the reply listed as source 19)
14. Chauhan, Vanova, Tailor, Asad and colleagues (2025). Chronotype and synchrony effects in human cognitive performance: A systematic review. Chronobiology International, 42(4), 463-499. https://doi.org/10.1080/07420528.2025.2490495 (abstract read)
15. NEOMA Business School (2025, 18 November). Well-being at work: why tackling tasks in the right order matters. https://neoma-bs.com/news/well-being-work-why-tackling-tasks-right-order-matters (a university news summary of the Zhang et al. study)
16. 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. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2019.3419 (abstract read)
17. Gal, D., & McShane, B. B. (2012). Can small victories help win the war? Evidence from consumer debt management. Journal of Marketing Research, 49(4), 487-501. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.11.0272 (abstract read)
18. Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65-94. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65 (abstract read)
19. Hagger, M. S., & Chatzisarantis, N. L. D. (2016). Commentary: Misguided effort with elusive implications, and sifting signal from noise with replication science. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 621. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00621 (full text read in Europe PMC, PMC4987495, during the second fact-check run)