📅 WEEK 22
📌 Rule No. 27 —Do the hard things first.
— What Keeps Getting Moved to Tomorrow
Every leader has a list of things they’ve been meaning to address. The list grows slowly and quietly until it becomes a problem.
Brian Tracy’s advice is deceptively simple: identify the most important, most difficult task in front of you, and do it before anything else. The frog on your desk doesn’t get easier to eat if you wait.
But the instinct runs the other way. The difficult task — the hard conversation, the strategic decision with incomplete information, the initiative that requires genuine concentrated effort — gets deferred. Smaller tasks fill the day. Progress is made on easy things while the important thing waits.
The psychological relief of completing small tasks is real. But it creates an illusion of productivity that is costly at the strategic level. The things that tend to wait are often the things that most directly affect whether the business advances.
The leaders I’ve observed who are most effective at execution have developed a simple but demanding habit: they identify the most important priority at the start of each week, and they work on it before they check anything else.
Do the hard things first is a principle in The Executives’ Institute that seems obvious and is practiced by very few. The reason is that it requires overriding the natural preference for comfort and momentum-building through easy wins.
The frog doesn’t shrink. Eat it early.
coming Monday, June 1, 2026
WEEK 22: Ask Yourself —Am I starting my day with tasks that matter most, or am I letting urgent but low-value work steal my energy?
Rule No. 27 SUMMARY
The tasks we avoid are often the ones that matter most. “Do the Hard Things First” is a call to discipline—tackle your toughest, highest-impact priorities before everything else. It’s not about doing more, it’s about doing what matters when your mind is sharp, your willpower is high, and your excuses haven’t shown up yet. In leadership and business, procrastination on the hard stuff is procrastination on progress.
Why: Because discipline compounds.
WEEK 22 Ask Yourself —
Am I starting my day with tasks that matter most, or am I letting urgent but low-value work steal my energy?
WEEK 22 Action Step —
Identify your “frog” for the week: List the top 1–3 high-impact tasks you’ve been avoiding. Schedule time first thing each day this week to tackle one of these tasks head-on—no distractions, no delays. Track your progress and note how your focus and momentum shift.
Rule: Do the hard things first.
Source: Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy
“One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not be done at all.” — Brian Tracy
Learning is sequential. Turn the page.