Eat the Frog is a memorable, if rather gross, metaphor that means choosing the most important thing you must do today and doing that first.

It derives from a variant of a quote that Mark Twain never said, "If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first."

Another way to think about it is that if you first Eat the Frog, everything else will be easier for the rest of the day. And won't that feel nice?

The Eat the Frog time management technique was popularised in Brian Tracy's productivity book Eat That Frog! Get More of the Important Things Done - Today!

Many tools in Tracy's book are based on the general premise that there will always be more to do than you can do. So, find the things that will have the most impact and do those first. The others will drift on by.

I once saw someone ask for advice on getting motivated to clean the house. One person answered: "Write a book."

Sometimes, our most significant and impactful goals are those on which we so readily procrastinate. Often, these will be in the important, not urgent, bucket.

You have a lot of things that need to be done or that you want to do

One of the nice things about eating the frog first thing is that getting it done feels really good. It helps build momentum for the rest of the day with a nice endorphin rush of ticking off something significant.

Decide on your Most Important Task (MIT) to tackle, ideally the night before. If it's too big and you can't finish it in one sitting, divide it into manageable chunks. Then start on the first chunk and leave everything else.

And sometimes the hardest thing to do is to start. So consider doing just 5 minutes. Once you've started, very often, keeping going becomes easy.

Questions that come up regularly in Tracy's book "Eat That Frog", including that for the Eating the Frog principle, are variations of:

What is the most important thing you could be doing?

If you weren't already doing this, would you start doing this?

What skills will take you furthest in your career?

What are you able to do best that others can't?

It all looks pretty straightforward when I read questions like these. But I have found that answering them is usually much harder.

Our goals are often interrelated. For example, earning more may require you to increase your skills first. And getting clear on what your most important goals are first is a prerequisite and also not always straightforward.

Then, what activities are the most important or will have the most impact can be unclear. And, sometimes, small actions such as an unexpected event or connection may have out-sized benefits. Or neglecting a seemingly minor task could lead to losing a significant client. But does it still make sense to try to work on the most important task first thing in the morning? Yes.

Like a child leaving a brussell sprout at the side of the plate to get cold while they eat the roast, it's easy to leave our most impactful and daunting tasks until after the easier stuff is done. But it doesn't usually help to wait.

As the saying goes, if you have to eat a live frog, it doesn't pay to look at it for long.

Face it, you'll never get caught up, so perhaps think about Oliver Burkeman's Rivers not Buckets

Don't make important decisions on an empty stomach

Eat the Frog is a fantastic example of putting the principles of making your idea Sticky into action

Another quote "from" Mark Twain appears in Big Ideas Little Pictures: "Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment."

The always excellent Quote Investigator describes the source of the Eat the Frog family of quotes from the French writer Nicolas Chamfort, who said, more or less, that eating a toad first thing would help steel you against the rest of the day as nothing worse will happen to you.

Eat the frog

This post is sketch 900 of Sketchplanations, according to my numbering. To mark that, I've been reflecting and wanted to share what I've learned from over a decade of this project.

It's my longest post, but I created a version you can listen to, or even watch 🙈, if you prefer. And if you don't want to listen, watch or read a long article, I hope you can just enjoy the sketch of Brenda Ueland's lovely wisdom.

Listen/watch reflections on a decade of Sketchplanations on YouTube

After the first year of one-a-day, I've done one sketch a week, 52 a year, for over a decade without missing. I've tried to stick to James Clear's "Never miss twice" rule by first not missing once.

With a few years of experience in creating and sharing under my belt, I wanted to share some thoughts about this project, about sharing your work, and about creative freedom.

I watched a talk by Jack Conte a few weeks ago. Jack is the founder of Patreon but was first—and still is—a passionate, talented musician full of energy and drive. The whole talk is interesting—he called it the Death of the Follower. But what drove me to create this was some of what he said towards the end, kind of his "advice to creatives."

I want to talk about two things: The why and what of creating, and second, what sort of project a creative project should be.

I've been lucky in so many ways with this project:

It was accidental, so I wasn't staking my future or my ego on it.

It was a side project—until this year—so I wasn't staking my paycheck and whether we could pay the mortgage and support our family on it.

And I stumbled on a simple formula that's given me great permission, licence, and scope to explore everything that interests me.

Without getting too grandiose about it, my conjured up tag line of "explaining the world one sketch at a time" is a huge mission, one that never really ends. But it also allows me to cover whatever aspects of our fascinating world that I want, in the way that I want.

Cartoonists also have a tremendous scope to create, but they usually have to make people laugh. Fortunately for me, I don't have to do that each time. I can cover serious things, or sensitive things, or fun things, or complex things in whichever way I want.

I'm also lucky that my drawings don't have to be good. Sometimes, I look back on older ones and cringe, but usually, I don't cringe at what I'm sharing, only my drawing of it.

Just a year or so into this project, when I complained to a good friend about not being the best artist, he simply replied, "Yes, but it's the content." It really stuck with me, and it's grown on me over time. The drawings may not be as slick as other artists. Still, the content and topics I tackle are hopefully valuable, or at least interesting, in themselves. So people, I think, forgive me when I don't get it quite right and it's a bit cheesy, or my people are a bit janky.

Part of the luck in my formula is that it's become a unique collection in style and approach. The more I've created, the more unique it becomes.

I am regularly asked how I choose and find topics to include. I only recently found the answer that really nails it.

On my website, I've joked, "Sooner or later, everything I know will be on Sketchplanations." And in some ways, that's true—at least for the useful stuff I know.

At first, sketches were a combination of serendipity in what happened to me that was interesting this week and a process of trawling through my experience and memory for the things I've found interesting and helpful over the years. And they were also what I found myself using or thinking about regularly.

Over the years, I've trained myself constantly to be on the lookout for topics. Sometimes I see, or read, or remember something that I instantly know I'll sketch at some point. I add it to my list, and those that I'm excited about and have the clearest view on are those I tackle the next week.

But that doesn't really address the question of what makes it into the list and what doesn't. What ties these together? The answer I found most profoundly hit when I read a wonderfully opinionated book, "If you Want to Write," by Brenda Ueland. Brenda says: 

And what is the purpose of existence… but to discover truth and beauty and…share it with others.

And it was suddenly clear to me. What makes it into the list is when I've found something that to me was a truth, an insight, an aha, a new piece of knowledge, something beautiful or fascinating that I realised. I had to feel I'd discovered something. Sketchplanations has given me the wonderful vehicle to act on the impulse to share it with so many others.

I usually consider myself knowledgeable about most sketches but an expert in few. But like the age-old realisation that the teacher learns more than the students, I can tell you that there's nothing like spending a day or more a week diving into a topic, thinking how to visualise it, spending several hours sketching it and then writing about it to cement them in my own brain. I'm no doubt the one who's benefited the most from this project.

It's not too long in a conversation with me before I might struggle not to interrupt with a "There's a sketch for that."

And this diverse collection of 900 sketches therefore, in many ways, reflects everything I find interesting and helpful or beautiful in the world, and so is a reflection of me. In that sense it's really rather personal.

Which brings me to the second aspect of what I want to share here.

I'm very lucky that many people provide suggestions for sketches they'd like to see. I've worked in design and user experience for many years. Having direct feedback of what your audience would like to see is extremely valuable. I've tackled some of them, but too few.

I find that I'm not a very good judge of sketches that will turn out to be popular—at least in the short run.

I send out new sketches each week in my newsletter. It's funny that even though I send out 10s of 1,000s of emails each month there's relatively little feedback of what people think about each new sketch.

I started posting sketches on social channels many years ago to allow more people to discover them and make it easier for people to share them.

And I post sketches on my website, so that people can find them in the future and get the answers they want when they're searching for something or looking for something to use in their own projects.

Posting on social media is interesting as, with likes, comments, shares and follower numbers I seemed to have much more feedback about whether what I did was interesting to people or not. Certainly as compared to the newsletter where there's no lightweight, low commitment way, save writing me a direct email, to let me know if it was helpful. I love receiving them by the way.

Once you start getting feedback on what seems to be popular however, you have a double-edged sword. For example, what if there's some truth or beauty that I want to share that is unlikely to be popular? Or what if there are things that will be popular that I don't find to be a truth or beauty that speaks to me or makes me want to share it.

If I was a business I think the answer is fairly clear—you create the content that your audience wants to see so people come to your site and buy your wares.

But what if a project reflects you personally? And what if it's an amateur project, created for the love of it rather than the $ of it?

I have tackled some sketches of topics that people asked for and that sometimes people have paid me for. What I found is that very quickly it begins to feel like a job. It's fine to do, but they're not always something that excites me.

For me, who fortunately for so long wasn't depending on it for my primary income, I found it very quickly took the joy out of the task. Why would I use my spare time—and often time from my family—to execute something that I wasn't excited about and didn't find joy in and didn't find a little spark or fire in sharing with others?

Don't get me wrong. Reaching more people with my work is great. I came round to marketing when I kept hearing "Wow, I just discovered your site. I love it!" 7 years after I'd been working on it. These people could have been following from the beginning if I'd just reached them earlier.

That was part of the impetus to create a physical book and hopefully reach a new set of people in a different way. This same feeling also drives me to work on making the website better—as the saying goes: "Business without marketing is like winking at a girl in the dark." What's the point of having good content if people can't find it? It seems a shame.

Well, one way I could reach more people, I think of, as "feeding the machine."

What I should do is find topics that have high search volume, topics that are topical or current, topics that draw a lot of engagement, topics that may be easy to grasp or share with others, and I should and do those. I should check search queries, watch what others are doing, and look for the content I post that creates the most interactions and create more content to match.

Simple messages without nuance or complexity are easy to share and take in and hit repost. But I can't bring myself to do it.

The things I keep wanting to share are my version of what Brenda called the "purpose of existence"—discovering truth and beauty and sharing it with others.

So I've resisted too much of feeding the machine. I'm sure it's cost me. I'm sure there are a million ways I could grow my followers faster, get more subscribers, get more content engagement, exploit new channels, write traffic heavy content. But I don't want to do those if it means I can't share the truths and beauty that I find valuable.

So, at sketch 900, I'm sharing these reflections as the struggles of a creator trying to understand the point and value of their project.

And to say that I plan to keep this project idiosyncratic, unexpected, and personal. Or, in some ways, a reflection of me. This will at least keep it unique.

I know that you won't find it all speaks to you—you're not me after all. But for the times when I do get it right, when you can see the truth or beauty that I'm trying to share, even if it's just you and me who appreciate it, I hope that will keep it worth it.

Jack Conte talks passionately and knowledgeably about the importance of building deep connections with small numbers of true fans. He built Patreon, through which I've benefited so much. And a deep personal thank you to everyone who is now supporting and has supported me in the past. And I've decided I'd rather, slowly, create a deeper, more personal connection with the people, perhaps like you, who have enjoyed my project, by sharing the truth or beauty that I want to share than to feed the machine and create what the machine says is needed.

Selfishly, I hope that this will also keep it interesting for me even if it may not do the rounds of the internet as well.

Thanks everyone who's visited, enjoyed, talked about, listened to the podcast or shared my work over the years. So many of you have been generous in sharing and singing the praises of this little project.

There is of course still so much more to explain about this world. Maybe 900 is a lot of topics sketched—or maybe, I'm just getting started.

Thanks for being part of the journey. See you at 1,000.

If you made it this far, it'd be amazing if you considered helping to get to 1,000 by supporting me at any amount on Patreon 🙏

Discovering Truth and Beauty and Sharing it with others

Public commitment pledges are surprisingly effective and free ways to help you reach your goals. A public commitment pledge is simply writing what you will or won't do, perhaps something you know you find hard, signing it, and displaying it publicly.

In her excellent book, How to Change, Katy Milkman describes how the simple intervention of a public commitment pledge in doctors' offices significantly reduced prescriptions of unnecessary antibiotics—just through a poster on the wall.

Commitment pledges are a form of what Katy calls a soft commitment device (of Odysseus fame). This strategy helps us stick to our commitments even when tempted to go astray.

Pledges may work through our desire for consistency and create cognitive dissonance when considering going against the pledge. The benefits of what we desire to do, say "eat cookies," are pitted against the potential guilt or discomfort we'd feel by going against what we said we'd do, not "eat cookies." You don't want to let yourself down. The pledge gives us a greater chance of sticking to our actions and a defence against our present bias.

Is there something you wish you'd do more of or less of? A simple public commitment pledge could help you on your way.

Other free ways to help you achieve your goals:

Public commitment pledge

Feedback is how we get better. It's how we find out what we couldn't see ourselves. But there are many reasons why it's more challenging to gather than we might hope.

You might have a design prototype, a book or article draft, a new practice you want your team to adopt, or a project you've been working on. Feedback will make it better, but it's easy to feel anxious.

You might want to avoid having to talk to people. Maybe you're worried about what others think—perhaps they won't like it. Maybe you'll have to start over. Maybe you'll hear what you know deep down. Maybe you might see that others could do it better than you, that it shouldn't be you that's doing it. Maybe you'll find out that you're a failure.

If we care about achieving the best outcome, we can dispel most of these fears with a few moments of reflection—of course, I'm not a failure for trying!—but it doesn't mean they feel any less real at the time. As is often the case, action can be the solution, and gathering feedback is, in my experience, usually energising and confidence-building—now you can see what will make your project fly.

Jane Austen was known to read her novels aloud to her family for both evening entertainment (pre-Netflix) and to help revise and hone her writing.

Remember, the first draft is always perfect.

Don't take things personally or yourself too seriously.

Don't get attached to one option—attach yourself instead to a great outcome.

To avoid sunk costs clouding your judgment, seek feedback before you're too invested.

Share multiple options when you can. It makes it easier for others to give comparative feedback and reduces the chances of taking it personally.

Remember how valuable good feedback has been in the past.

Consider who to gather feedback from. Sometimes complete strangers can help (who cares if they don't like it?), and other times a friendly face can ease you into it.

Remember the spectrum policy to focus on the good in an idea.

Feedback fear

Temptation bundling is a self-enforced technique that combines something you want to do with something you find hard to do.

If you find it hard to work out at the gym, you can make it more appealing by only watching your favourite shows when you're there. If you struggle to get down to working on a project, combine it with the only time you order your favourite drink. The hope is that the treat is enough to get you stuck into the hard task.

Temptation bundling is a kind of commitment device like that used by Odysseus.

Temptation bundling is from Katy Milkman, who also taught me about the Fresh start effect, and has a book called How to Change. It's also one of the techniques discussed in James Clear's Atomic Habits.

For a study evaluating temptation bundling, see: Holding the Hunger Games Hostage at the Gym: An Evaluation of Temptation Bundling, Milkman et al., Management Science, 2014

Temptation bundling

The magic of a first draft is that the first draft is always perfect. It doesn't matter if it's rubbish, if it's messy, if it doesn't flow, if it lacks personality, or if it won't work. The job of a first draft is to be a draft and get the process started. So however it turns out, the first draft has done its job perfectly.

In the illustrated art collection by Dr Seuss you can see some of the first drafts and iterations of text and images that go to refine the seemingly effortless rhythm, rhyme and combination of text and images from his wacky illustrations.

Donald Schön, in his classic The Reflective Practitioner, goes further by sharing his analysis of design as a reflective conversation – observing each mark sketched on paper informs the next you make. You don't know how it will turn out until you put pen to paper. Seeing what comes out allows you to adapt and modify as you go in a back-and-forth of discovery and evaluation.

Don't worry about your first draft — it'll be perfect.

I read this for the first time in an article by Casey Fowler that's no longer live. Most likely, it originates from the novelist Jane Smiley:

"Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist. It's perfect in its existence. The only way it could be imperfect would be to NOT exist."

The first draft is always perfect

Extrinsic motivation is the carrot or the stick — when the motivation for doing something is an IF/THEN reward or punishment. We use extrinsic motivation all the time like paying people to come into work, or issuing speeding fines to make people slow down. It can work well for simple problems, basic compliance, and short-term results.

However, when you need long-term behaviour change, when creativity is needed, or you're tackling complex problems, external rewards and the threat of punishments can even decrease performance and productivity. Rewards only go so far if you want to inspire a hit album, create the next Oscar-winning film, or create a breakthrough product. That is, for most of the important work we do in our lives, including I believe parenting, using extrinsic motivators of rewards or punishments is likely to be far less effective than tapping into intrinsic motivation — motivation that comes from inside ourselves.

I like Dan Pink's Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose framework for intrinsic motivation. His TED talk on the Puzzle of Motivation is also a fun and interesting watch.

Extrinsic motivation

Intuitively, we can relate to this: as we get closer to completing a goal we can feel more motivation to complete it. Getting close to the last piece of a puzzle, the last clue of a murder mystery or escape room, the final chapter of your book (perhaps), the final kilometre of a marathon, or as you find you need just one more stamp to get a free coffee, being so close to our goal can give us a motivation lift to get to the end. It has a name:  the goal-gradient effect*.

In the example in the sketch, Oleg Urminksy and coauthors found that as people approached the final stamp towards a free coffee they were more likely to pick up the rate of buying coffees. And when issued with the new card, the coffee buying rate went back down again. They also found that it wasn't so much the absolute 'distance' from a goal, but the perception of distance. So, people who started out on a 12 stamp card with 2 stamps already complete tended to complete the card faster than the people who had a 10 stamp card starting empty even though it was the same number of stamps to the goal.

Read more in Katy Milkman and Kassie Brabaw's Scientific American article, Why Feeling Close to the Finish Line Makes You Push Harder.

Katy Milkman also educated me about the fresh start effect.

*The goal-gradient effect is also known as the goal-gradient hypothesis

The goal-gradient effect

Manager Time and Maker Time explain how managers or makers need to manage time differently.

In Manager Time, a day is neatly sliced up into hourly chunks according to the calendar. Meeting someone is as easy as finding a free slot that coincides. You don’t have to worry too much about what you’ll be doing next as your calendar will tell you.

In Maker Time, a day is an open book to get something hard and meaningful done. Even thinking when a meeting might be and remembering to go can distract from getting on with making.

Long, uninterrupted chunks of time, not sliced and diced by meetings on the hour, are ideal for making progress on hard problems and tackling something new. Even a single meeting in the middle of an afternoon can disrupt that long, meaningful chunk into two, making it harder to tackle something big as you have to context switch and pick up where you left off.

Most modern offices operate on Manager Time. It’s great for meetings but comes at the cost of getting meaningful work done. If you’re a maker, you may associate with the feeling that to get some real work done, you need to do it on the weekend or an evening after everyone’s gone home, when you’ll be free of interruptions.

If you’re a manager, consider your makers when you schedule your next meeting.

This observation is from Paul Graham's excellent article Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.

Umbrella management and funnel management

Manager time, maker time

Sometimes we’re smart enough to know that we’ll have trouble doing something we want to get done. That might be going to the gym, finishing that essay instead of goofing around, quitting smoking, doing your taxes, or, if you happen to be Odysseus, listening to the sirens’ song without going crazy and diving in the water or driving your boat to be crashed on to the rocks.

In these cases, you can try a commitment device: a voluntary restriction to help maintain our future self-control. In Odysseus’s case he instructed his men to fill their ears with wax and to bind him the mast and told them if he asked them to let him go then they were to bind him tighter. In this way, he managed to listen to the sirens’ song without ending up at the bottom of the sea.

Other commitment device’s may be more mundane, such as publicly announcing to your friends that you’re going to do something, paying a bunch of money to sign up for something upfront, or handing a $20 bill to a friend with instructions not to give it back until you’ve done what you’re supposed to.

Here are some nice examples of commitment devices.

Commitment device

Ever had that feeling when people said "well done" or "thank you" for what you did, that you didn’t deserve it? It’s called imposter syndrome.

It’s a pernicious and pervasive feeling of doubting your accomplishments and fear of being exposed as a fraud — at any moment, everyone will wake up and realise you aren’t so great after all.

My thoughts: Hang in there, keep trying your best, stay humble, and don’t take things too seriously. And accept compliments.

Imposter syndrome

The power of streaks — achieving something on a schedule without missing a slot —  have a remarkable pull over us when it comes to helping us get things done.

As Seth Godin points out, streaks turn an activity into a game. And while we may have started out with the intention simply of completing the activity, our continued motivation can transfer to simply be the motivation of keeping the streak going.

If you’re into streaks or want to give them a try to achieve something yourself, you might like the Streaks app (which is how I knew I’d done 2 years without missing), Austin Kleon’s 30-day challenge, or the simple power of one-a-day.

Streaks can also have a dark side: if you break the chain you can think it’s not worth getting started again. For that reason, I like James Clear’s advice to never miss twice.

The power of streaks

The Doorstep Mile is a brilliant Norwegian concept for how the hardest part of a journey can be just getting out of the door.

So, sometimes, as Seth Godin would say, the most important thing is just to start — start small, start now, step by step, day by day, and you can give yourself the chance to make something amazing.

Got something you’ve been meaning to start? Maybe today’s the day?

When I created this sketch, it was my 104th in consecutive weeks — 2 years of weekly sketches without missing (the power of streaks) — and sketchplanation number 583 in total. And I can tell you that it didn’t start glamorously, and they weren’t high quality or even interesting, but I did start. Sketch by sketch. Week by week.

More sketches about starting and getting started.

The doorstep mile

In Dan Pink’s book Drive, he looks at scientific studies showing that the all too common approach to motivating people involving rewards and punishments, or the carrot and stick approach, ultimately doesn’t help motivate people for the tasks and work we have to do today.

Instead, we do our best work when driven by intrinsic motivation — motivation from inside us rather than imposed externally like rewards or punishments. And the 3 facets he highlights that help intrinsic motivation are:

Autonomy: being in control and able to guide both what we do and how we do it

Mastery: our desire to continually be improving and learning and bettering ourselves

Purpose: working towards something we think is worthwhile. Having a North Star to aim for and a reason it’s worth doing what we’re doing.

I find it a useful framework to think through whenever I’m not feeling motivated or when I want to help make sure the people I’m working with are motivated.

Also see: flow at work, Goldilocks tasks, the zone of proximal development, on parenting

What drives us: autonomy, mastery, purpose

The Fresh Start Effect explains why we’re more likely to tackle meaningful goals or form new habits at the start of a day, week, month, or year. These fresh beginnings—like a birthday, moving to a new house, or even a Monday morning—are powerful mental triggers that motivate us to take action and start anew.

It’s fascinating how the simple act of marking a “start” can make us more open to change and new challenges. Whether it’s the first day of the year or the start of a new chapter in life, these moments provide a sense of renewal and opportunity.

We explored this idea on the podcast: Listen to The Fresh Start Effect on the Sketchplanations podcast

And you can also hear about it from Katy Milkman herself, Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, on the Freakonomics podcast: When Willpower Isn’t Enough.

The fresh start effect

…but it increases quality because your name is attached to it.

…and it almost always provides unexpected benefits, because you never know what others will do.

I have experienced all of this first hand through this Sketchplanations project. I credit sharing and creating in public, with Sketchplanations eventually becoming the book Big Ideas Little Pictures.

Sharing your work

Having played the piano most of my life I only started composing when I started spontaneously dropping by the music practice rooms at UC Berkeley in the middle of the day. Without any music I was practically forced to start making things up. Every now and then it’s new and nice. You can listen to a few short piano pieces on youtube.

I strongly believe in this as advice, but it does presuppose years of copying and playing others’ music as well as the basics of music theory. Replicate, then innovate

More sketches about starting and getting started

Want to compose? Just sit down without any music

A few minutes of writing each day or a sketch can end up as a book (like Big Ideas Little Pictures)

One piece of litter from each of us ends up as a trash heap, or a small souvenir taken with you can mean nothing is left for anyone.

Thanks to Seth Godin for sharing the simple power of one a day. Sketchplanations was founded on this principle.

Motivation sketches