Eat the frog: the method, the book and how to adapt it for ADHD

It’s 9:40. Your tax return has been sitting in a browser tab for three weeks. Since breakfast you’ve answered four emails and cleaned your desk. The tax return is your frog.

What does eat the frog mean?

Eating the frog means doing your most important and most dreaded task first. Brian Tracy describes your frog as your biggest, most important task: the one you’re most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it. If the first thing you do in the morning is eat a live frog, nothing worse can happen to you for the rest of the day.

A frog can be a 10-minute job. The tax return, a call to the landlord about the deposit, a report that’s two weeks late, booking the dentist you’ve avoided for a year: what they share is the wince you feel when you think of them.

Where does the saying come from?

The line is usually credited to Mark Twain, but Quote Investigator found no substantive evidence that Twain ever said or wrote it. The oldest known version is French. In the 1790s, the writer Nicolas Chamfort quoted a man who said you should swallow a toad every morning, so that nothing would disgust you for the rest of the day. The earliest link to Twain that Quote Investigator found dates from 1988, long after his death in 1910. The full story is in where “eat the frog” comes from.

Eat That Frog!, the book by Brian Tracy

Eat That Frog! is a short book on time management and procrastination by Brian Tracy, first published in 2001 by Berrett-Koehler. Its subtitle, 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time, sums up the format: 21 short chapters, each built around one technique. A fourth edition came out in 2025, revised with about a quarter new material. In French, the book is called Avalez le crapaud !

The book is written for busy professionals. It assumes that once you know what your frog is, you can make yourself start it. Many people with ADHD get stuck on that exact step.

How does the eat the frog method work?

The method fits in five steps:

1. Keep one list. Everything you have to do goes in it, so nothing lives only in your head.
2. Pick your frog. The evening before or first thing in the morning, ask: if I could do only one thing today, which one would make the biggest difference? Tracy’s rule when two tasks compete: start with the biggest, hardest one.
3. Eat it first. Start before email, messages and small jobs, without thinking about it for too long.
4. Stay with it. Tracy’s advice is to persist until the task is complete before moving on to something else.
5. Tomorrow, pick a new frog. One per day.

Does the eat the frog method work?

We found no study that tests “eat the frog” by name, but two lines of research point the same way. A 2020 study of emergency-room doctors found that under heavy workload, they tended to pick easier cases first. Once adjusted for case complexity, this habit went with lower output, and easier cases went with less learning over time (KC and colleagues, Management Science).

A large review of procrastination research found that how unpleasant a task feels is one of the strongest predictors of putting it off (Steel, 2007). Your frog is, by definition, the unpleasant task. Doing it first gives it the best slot, before the day fills up with easier things.

Does eat the frog work with ADHD?

It can, once adapted. ADHD is a lasting pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity and impulsivity that gets in the way of daily life. For adults, the US National Institute of Mental Health lists disorganization and procrastination, poor time management and planning, and trouble focusing on a large task among its everyday effects. A method that picks one priority in advance targets exactly that.

The weak point is the start. A frog is unpleasant by definition, and often big too. If your plan says “do my taxes” at 9:00, you can sit in front of it for an hour, open three other tabs, and end the morning feeling worse. For more on that freeze, see ADHD task paralysis.

The adapted version below borrows from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for adults with ADHD. In a trial with 86 adults who still had symptoms despite medication, 12 sessions of CBT led to more improvement than relaxation training (Safren and colleagues, JAMA, 2010). That program teaches one task list, setting priorities and breaking problems into manageable steps (Sprich and colleagues, 2010). Therapists taught these skills. A method or an app doesn’t replace that kind of care.

How to adapt eat the frog for ADHD

Keep the frog, change the way you start it:

• Make the frog smaller. “Do my taxes” becomes “fill in the income section”. You eat one piece today and another tomorrow.
• Give it a 2-minute first step. “Open the tax website and log in.” The method is in the 2-minute first step.
• Allow yourself 5 minutes. Set a timer, work on the frog for 5 minutes, then decide. Stopping still counts. See the 5-minute rule.
• Pick a start time. “At 10:00, I open the tax website.” In a 2006 meta-analysis of 94 tests, plans written as “if X happens, I do Y” had a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals, getting started included (Gollwitzer and Sheeran).
• Keep the day short. One frog, 2 important tasks, up to 5 small ones. Everything else waits in your list. The routine is in plan your day in one minute.
• Warm up if you need to. If the frog won’t move, tick one small task, then go back to the frog’s first step.
• Drop the guilt. If the frog is still there at night, move it to tomorrow, put it back in your list or let it go. The evening review takes two minutes.

Frequently asked questions

What is an example of eating the frog?

You’ve avoided calling your bank about a wrong fee for three weeks. Eating the frog means making that call at 9:00, before email. In the ADHD version, the frog also gets a first step (“find the bank’s number and put it on the screen”) and a start time (“9:00, after coffee”). Then you allow yourself 5 minutes. With the call behind you, the rest of the day is easier to face.

Do I have to eat the frog first thing in the morning?

No. Tracy recommends tackling your major task first thing each morning, but the point is to do it before easier tasks take over your day. If your mornings go to school runs or a commute, your “first” might be 10:30. Pick a start time you can keep and give the frog that slot. A small warm-up task before it is fine.

What if I have two frogs?

Pick one. Tracy’s rule is to start with the biggest and hardest. With ADHD, a simpler test helps: which one has been waiting the longest, or which one has a deadline? Make that one today’s frog and put the other in tomorrow’s plan. With two frogs on the same morning, it’s easy to start neither.

Is eat the frog the same as the Pomodoro technique?

No. Eat the frog tells you which task comes first. The Pomodoro Technique, created by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980s, is a method for planning the work itself and dealing with interruptions. The two fit together: pick your frog, then work on it with Pomodoro. The differences, and which one to try first with ADHD, are in eat the frog vs Pomodoro.

Is there an app for the eat the frog method?

Yes. Frogg is an iPhone app built around this method for ADHD. Each morning, or the evening before, you pick one frog, 2 important tasks and up to 5 small ones. The frog gets a 2-minute first step, a start time and a 5-minute timer you can stop. The method is free, with no account. See how Frogg works.

Sources

1. Brian Tracy, The Truth About Frogs (briantracy.com)
2. Open Library, Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time (first published 2001, Berrett-Koehler)
3. Penguin Books New Zealand, Eat That Frog!, Fourth Edition (Berrett-Koehler, 2025)
4. Quote Investigator, Eat a Live Frog Every Morning, and Nothing Worse Will Happen to You the Rest of the Day (2013)
5. Diwas S. KC et al., Task Selection and Workload: A Focus on Completing Easy Tasks Hurts Performance, Management Science (2020)
6. Piers Steel, The nature of procrastination, Psychological Bulletin (2007)
7. NIMH, ADHD in Adults: 4 Things to Know
8. Steven A. Safren et al., Cognitive behavioral therapy vs relaxation with educational support for medication-treated adults with ADHD, JAMA (2010)
9. Susan E. Sprich et al., Description and Demonstration of CBT for ADHD in Adults, Cognitive and Behavioral Practice (2010)
10. Peter M. Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran, Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (2006)
11. Francesco Cirillo, About Francesco (creator of the Pomodoro Technique)