The Frog or the Appetiser

Productivity culture offers two opposite rituals: swallow the most unpleasant task first, or warm up on the easiest one. Both pieces of advice sound universal, although they work in different states — sometimes on the same day.

Starting with the unpleasant thing helps when:

• the task is important;
• avoiding it eats your attention;
• it needs a fresh head;
• the other jobs make a convenient cover;
• the day gets noticeably simpler afterwards.

In that case the long list is best put away for a while. Pick one task, write it down separately and do not turn the page over until it is done. Otherwise the brain will quickly discover an urgent need to rename some folders further down the list.

Starting with the easy thing helps in a different situation:

• time is limited;
• the tasks are independent;
• the result is judged by the number of items completed;
• a hard task could swallow the whole time available;
• you need to get into a working state.

In an exam there is no point spending an hour wrestling with one elegant question and leaving ten simple ones unanswered. At the start of a hard day, one short finished task can give you the momentum for the next.

So the question is not which recommendation is true. The question is what kind of obstacle you have.

If avoidance is in the way, start with the unpleasant. If inertia is in the way, start with the simple. If time is limited, start with whatever gives the most result per unit of time. If one task decides the fate of the project, start with it, even if twelve convenient trifles are lying next to it.

The rule “eat the frog in the morning” is useful. But first it is worth making sure it really is a frog and not a decorative task we assigned importance to for the sake of drama.

Someone who has to call the insurance company and contest a refusal usually starts the morning with email. Email is legitimate work: forty messages, eight of which need answers, by lunch the inbox is clean and the day feels productive. The phone call, meanwhile, is still hanging there and now weighs more than it did at nine, because a sense that the day is already spent has been added to it. By evening the call moves to tomorrow, and tomorrow will start with the same email, which will again contain eight messages needing answers.

One simple sign tells them apart: if finishing the task will bring relief not in the calendar but in the chest, it is a frog, and it goes first. If the relief shows up only in the list, it is an appetiser, and its place is decided by arithmetic rather than drama.