Frog Day: facing our fears one task at a time
When my company was closing, and after all the bad and stressful bits had been done, I felt this immense sense of lightness. I could walk around during the day doing nothing in particular, and still feel a kind of low-level happiness, a sense of joy in just existing. This huge change really surprised me.
However, it eroded over time. Four months later, even though I was on a career break and doing a lot of fun and relaxing things all the time, that sense of peace gradually started to get lost, and some of the same sadness and problems came back to me. And this is like — I’m meditating every day, I’m doing 2–3h of yoga most days, if ever my schedule was conducive to peace and relaxation, it is now.
What I found I needed was Frog Day.
What is a frog?
There’s a course I love here in Cambridge called EnterpriseWISE. It is a training course for entrepreneurial women, and includes a lot of personal development, as much as tips on starting a business. There is a talk that Shirley Jamieson (Cambridge Enterprise) does every year, on how to defeat your frogs.
“If the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.”
The idea is that we all have tasks that are frogs. They’re unpleasant, we avoid them, and the longer we spend avoiding them, the bigger and uglier they get. So what Shirley advocates is that we should face these first thing, and make sure that we deal with them before they get out of hand.
The origin of Frog Day
I’m on a career break at the moment. Whoever told you that time off will get boring quickly was either lying to you or lacks imagination. Far from bored — I found that my time filled up quickly with travelling, socialising, exercise, cooking increasingly elaborate meals… Generally enjoying life.
However, I found that my procrastination time could vastly expand as well because of this. Usually when I’m under more stress, well — not all stress is bad. It’s a bit like a guitar being tuned correctly. The right amount of tension makes you more productive. Too little tension, and you can endlessly float around in a sort of happy daze not getting much done. Too much tension for too long, and you might want to give yourself a long chunk of happy daze time to recover after that.
Bits of stress and bits of admin would still come my way (closing a company takes longer than you might think). But now that I was in happy daze time, it was easy to put off by weeks rather than days, because who wants to miss yoga and socialising to go to work, if you technically can put it off by another few days every time. The problem is, the happy daze became a miserable daze pretty quickly from doing this. Some part of your brain knows if you’re hiding from a task, and you just become encumbered and lose that sense of lightness, even if you’re going through the motions of exactly the same activities.
Bring in Frog Day.
Frog Day is the one day a week where I come to the office psyched up to face down my worst frogs. Or in gamer imagery — I come ready to try and defeat a Level 15 Frog Boss, or at least do my best and get a bit more experience in, to come closer to defeating them next time.
Frog Day tips for the intrepid frog warrior
Do things first thing
Lots of research shows that our willpower is a finite resource. We have a lot of it in the morning, but by the end of the day, decision-fatigue and willpower-fatigue will set in. So set aside a day. Put it in your calendar in advance. And resolve to start defeating those frogs as soon as your morning coffee has been consumed.
Try and change context
I find Frog Day fails before it has even begun, if I try and work from home. At the moment I’m lucky to have a co-working space I can pop into and do work days from (thanks ideaSpace! you guys are the best :) ). Otherwise I try and work from a cafe, from someone else’s house, anywhere but home. Otherwise I find that I’m just too comfortable, and there are too many potential distractions.
Make lists
I love ticking things off lists. It really helps. I use Wunderlist and it’s pretty great, but a piece of paper / notebook works equally well, or any app that works for you.
Break things down into small tasks
The frog boss might be too intimidating as a whole entity, but perhaps the first step alone is a lot more manageable. For particularly dreaded tasks, I go as far as breaking them down into:
1. Switch on computer
2. Open file
…
It gives you a little bit of a burst of satisfaction when you can tick off the task, and gets you that little bit closer to defeating the frog.
Set a time limit
When a task is too continuous to be broken down into tiny tasks, it can get especially intimidating. For example, if the kitchen is a mess and it will take a few hours to clean, it’s hard to even start. I find setting a timer for a manageable amount of time really helps here. e.g. Commit to doing 20 mins of cleaning, set a timer, and stop after that 20 mins. On a bad day, commit to 5 mins. It doesn’t matter. Any progress is better than being stuck on the same task for days / weeks. This is the basis of the Pomodoro technique.
Have a rotating set of timers
I use this app called 30/30, but again, you can do this much more low-tech with any timer / stopwatch. The idea is that I bribe myself to do unpleasant work by building in some pleasant time in between. So a schedule might look like:
- 10 min work
- 5 min fun time (e.g. surfing the internet)
- 10 min admin
- 5 min personal time (e.g. messaging friends)
At first I stick to the timers. After a while, I sometimes find that I naturally get absorbed into work tasks, in which case I continue with those. Once you can feel a difficult task actually starting to shift, it begins to be rewarding in its own right, but I find the timer really helpful when it’s hard to even begin.
The frog philosophy
My brain has recently been incubating in some strange mix of meditation, yoga, books about buddhism and the Marvel universe.
I think that on the one hand, there is a lot of training and practice that we can do to make ourselves calmer and happier, and that it’s important to work on our minds in this way.
But on the other hand, I believe we’re all confronted by frog bosses that we have to face, whether because the tax return deadline is coming up, or because New York City will be blown up by a shadow organisation called The Hand otherwise. So in that sense, we all have our fights that we can’t avoid.
I think that facing our frogs is the way we earn our peace.
