Doing the Hard Work First

“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”― Mark Twain

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

Meaning — you really need to do the hardest thing first. Period. End of story. Stop arguing. Just shut up and get to work.

It’s hard. It’s difficult to get motivated to do something that is challenging. You are afraid of trying to do something hard. You are afraid that you will fail. There are different schools of thought about what should be done first, on what sequence you should do certain tasks, but realistically you need to do the hardest things first. Why? Because I said so.

Now with that, I don’t mean just jumping right in, tearing it open, trying to get it completed haphazardly. Sound and fury mean nothing. You still need to plan and understand the steps that are necessary to do those hard things. You would not just walk into the gym and deadlift 500 pounds, you would hurt yourself! So why would you attack the hardest thing without preparation, some of the pre-work done necessary to succeed?

Why should you attack the hardest thing first? Because it’s right there in front of you. It’s necessary to get it out of the way. The elephant in the room. If you do that hard thing first, you get a sense of accomplishment that cannot be matched — until you find the next hardest thing. It puts that in the bank as an accomplishment, the feeling of conquering your fear and the reward of success! The amount of work that it takes to get the hardest thing done first seems monumental, but you can get a return on that energy investment after completing that task.

Now that we sit and think about it, what is the hard work? What is the thing that stops you from doing your job? It is simply just starting. Trying to start that hard task — the one you don’t want to do. Either you are not engaged, or not invested in the work needing to be done. Or you perceive that it may be hard when in all reality the hardest part is starting. It probably really isn’t the fact that the task is difficult, you don’t want to start because that’s a hard decision to make. Make that decision, go do the hard thing now.

It works in language therapy

Michael Bloomberg thinks this way

Jack Ma believes in it

Lifehacker flip flops on it but still thinks it is a good idea

Simple ways to attack the hardest thing:

1. Break it down into manageable chunks.
2. Work on the manageable chunks.

Hm. Seems doable. More?

3. Set your calendar to work only on those tasks

4. Have the discipline to work through those tasks and stay working on them

5. Measure your results. If you say you will have a task done by 10am, be intellectually honest with yourself and be done with it at 10am.