Eat the Frog
Building consistency with one simple rule
Hey everyone!
I’m Stefan, indie maker and founder of multiple online products like colorpeguin.com, starterindex.com, and myfocus.zone.
I started this journey about 2 years ago, had a lot of fun experimenting and building 10+ products, and grew ColorPenguin to $1k MRR.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to figure out my next challenge. With about 1 year of runway left, I wanted to make sure I chose the best possible path.
And I really went all in:
I made Odyssey plans
I wrote secondary plans & prototypes every day for 2 weeks
I spoke to 15+ people about what direction to take
I considered making a dev agency, starting another product, going all in on an existing one, doing part-time freelancing, or getting a corporate job.
You can notice a pattern here. I wrote about 6000 words, without finding what I was looking for.
I didn’t have a strategy problem, I had an action problem.
The more I planned, the more time I spent stuck in the same place — so I needed a way of breaking the cycle.
Eating the Frog
To counteract this behaviour and put an end to my planning spree, I’ve adopted the “Eat the Frog” technique.
The idea is simple:
Do the hardest, most important task first thing in the day.
The “frog” is the task you’re most likely to procrastinate — the thing that actually moves your life or business forward.
For me, writing publicly is something I’ve avoided these past 2 years. So my frog for today was simply to start publishing. 😎
Why should you try it?
It forces you to prioritize what matters
You get a concrete win early in the day
You retrain your brain to stop avoiding hard tasks
How to identify frogs?
First, you need to understand what a frog is and isn’t:
They are important, not urgent tasks that can help you make progress towards your goal. Starting a blog, defining a concept for a new product, and making a proposal for a client are “frogs”. Answering email, coding a nice-to-have feature, and replying on X are not.
They usually require 2-4 hours and can be broken down into multiple sub-sessions.
They come with mental resistance attached. If it feels too hard, like you want to postpone it, you’ve probably found your frog.
Tracking frogs
This technique builds compound interest. As you do more frogs, you get better at choosing them, breaking them down into manageable pieces, and building momentum.
I use Obsidian to write a simple to-do list every day from which I pick the most important one. Sometimes I do the list at the end of the day for the next morning. I don’t follow a strict rule here, but in general, it’s best not to plan your frogs too much in advance.
As a reflection exercise, I look back on the past month and see which frogs I chose, how much time they took and what I can improve. I’m building myfocus.zone to track time and reflect on my frogs, but more about this in the future.
Wrapping up
That’s it for my first issue! I plan to keep this Substack about indie hacking, productivity, habits and interesting stuff I come across online.
PS: If you are already using Eat the Frog technique, I would love to know more about your process! Don’t hesitate to DM me on X.