Instead of procrastinating at work, try ‘eating the frog’

3 months ago 18

Opinion

December 4, 2025 — 3.46pm

Can you hear that? The sound in the distance? It’s the faint drum of a rapidly approaching deadline, and it’s getting louder every minute.

The finishing line for the working year is coming up, and it signals the last frantic rush of activity before we collapse onto the beach or a couch for the summer break. And right now, workers around the country are scrambling to cross things off their to-do list that they’ve been putting off all year.

As author Brian Tracy said, if it’s your job to eat a frog, you’re best to do it first thing in the morning.

What this looks like will be individual for each person. It might be a long list of client calls you’ve been meaning to make for months, signing off an important contract, or finally getting all your expense invoices into the system so you can be reimbursed before the holidays.

Whatever tasks you’ve been avoiding, there’s nothing like the threat of an approaching deadline to motivate you to complete them.

I’m currently deep into writing my fourth book that’s all about conflict in the workplace and outside it. If I didn’t have a looming date that I need to hand a draft to my agent and publisher, I would forever marinate in ideas instead of grabbing hold of the most pertinent ones and forcing myself to turn them into clear sentences.

Eighty per cent of people admit to putting things off at work. The other 20 per cent are obviously lying.

Deadlines are one of the most effective tools we have to combat procrastination. One of the reasons for this is commonly known as “Parkinson’s Law”, named after British historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson who wrote an essay in The Economist in 1955.

He worked as a public servant for years and famously wrote that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. It’s an acute observation that’s proven itself correct many times over. We tend to work as hard as we need to for the time that we are allocated.

There are some limits to this, but if you only have a fortnight left of the working year to try to squeeze in work you’ve been meaning to get to, the reality is that you’re probably going to finish it.

We all procrastinate, with various studies estimating that about 80 per cent of people admit to putting things off at work. The other 20 per cent are obviously lying. As the year winds down and the pressure builds up, how can you take advantage of this deadline to get things done and start 2026 with a clean slate?

The simplest method I try to follow is known as “eating the frog”. It’s a term popularised by author Brian Tracy who said that if it’s your job to eat a frog, you’re best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, always eat the biggest one first.

It’s a useful and memorable metaphor to remind us that we should try to tackle big tasks first, but we usually avoid these until they keep stacking on top of each other until something – like a deadline – forces our hand.

So, as the drumbeat of Christmas gets louder, write down your frog and eat it first thing tomorrow morning. Once you start getting through them, the momentum will build and power you all the way through to that sun-lounger under the beach umbrella that is waiting for you in just a few more weeks.