Eat the Frog — Do the Worst Task First
If the first hour of your day goes to email, the day belongs to everyone but you. Eating the frog means doing your hardest, most avoided task first — while your willpower is at its daily maximum.
The method in three steps
Each evening, choose tomorrow's frog: the single task you are most likely to procrastinate on, usually because it is hard, ambiguous or boring. Each morning, do that task first, before email, chat or meetings. Nothing else has higher priority until it is done or meaningfully advanced.
The mechanism is willpower arithmetic. Self-control is highest in the first hours after waking and degrades through the day; by afternoon, the frog has accumulated a full day of dread and every easier task has become an excuse to postpone it.
Choosing the right frog
A good frog is specific and bounded — "draft the difficult paragraph", not "work on the novel". If the frog is genuinely too big for one morning, the frog is the first slice of it: outline the hard section, make the uncomfortable phone call, write the ugly first version.
Only one frog per day. The method's power is its smallness: one decision, made the night before, removes the morning's most expensive negotiation with yourself.