Mark Twain once said, Eat a life frog first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day (side note: whether Twain actually said this is debatable).

Of all the productivity hacks I’ve tried, my favourite is eating the frog. The idea is that if you do your worst task (=frog) first thing in the morning, you can ride your wave of accomplishment through all your easier tasks, leading to a productive day. Makes sense: if you do tough work early, you can’t procrastinate on it. And personally, eating the frog in the morning has carried me through University life so far.

But what exactly is this frog? Though there is no consistent definition, most people define the frog as the most difficult, mentally strenuous task that must be completed that day. Some people have even gone to say that if you don’t eat the frog, the frog will eat you (yikes).

However, I’ve recently noticed that the days I eat the bad, ugly frog early on aren’t the days I remember at all. In fact, many of my most productive days I can hardly remember being pleasant at all. Rather, my best days have consistently been ones with:

• A good night’s rest;
• Some journaling and reading;
• A bit of exercise;
• New and interesting things learnt; and
• Quality time around people I love.

And often, getting too caught up in being productive and doing good work leads to failing multiple of these conditions.

So tonight, I wonder: where does one draw the line between being productive vs. living a good life? Do the two need to be mutually exclusive? Can they be mutually exclusive? My guess is that the answer to these questions depends entirely on each individual and their dreams and ambitions.

On a slightly unrelated note, this eating the frog business reminds me of a piece by Marcus Aurelius in his meditations:

1. When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.