Why You Should Start Every Day by Accomplishing a Small Task

When you have a lot of tasks to accomplish on a given day, there are a few different approaches you can take to kick-start your productivity. You can “eat the frog”—that is, get your hardest, most demanding responsibility out of the way before anything else. On the other hand, you could bang out something especially easy first. Here’s why that might be a better fit for you.

Why you should do a simple task first thing every day

When you eat the frog and take on a difficult task right away, you are supposed to focus on it intently and get it all done. The problem with that is that smaller, nagging responsibilities, like answering emails or scheduling meetings, are stuck in your head, buzzing around. You may not be able to focus as well if you’re preoccupied with a bunch of other little things. Knocking those out first could clear the path you need to really get into deep work when it’s time to do something more challenging or time-consuming.

The second reason this strategy works is that you get a boost from the feeling of accomplishment once you knock something off your to-do list. Sure, it’s something small—but that feeling of accomplishment can be disproportionately large and can start your day off with an easy win, setting you up to keep moving forward.

How to decide what tasks are big and which are small

In general, the task you’re dreading or procrastinating on the most is probably the one that’s going to take the most effort, but that doesn’t always have to be true. I’m great at focusing on big projects and terrible at doing the little maintenance tasks, like responding to emails or filing invoices. I can sit down to write a long essay with no problem, but will put off a one-pager for weeks if I can, only to realize it took me all of 15 minutes and almost no brainpower to complete once I actually committed to doing it. The key to selecting a small task to do first thing every day is identifying one you know will be easy, but will result in some kind of reward feeling in your brain. Whether it’s easy or not doesn’t matter as long as you’ll feel good when it’s over—and picking something you don’t exactly want to do is an easy way to make sure that happens.

Beyond that, you should make a habit of sorting your responsibilities by timeliness and importance. Use a system like the Eisenhower matrix or Kanban to figure out what you actually need to do, then select something from that category that you’ll be able to get done quickly and efficiently, get it out of the way, and bask in the accomplishment as you move forward with your day and its more difficult demands.