Hello,
I want to build discipline in “Eating my frog”.
Eating that frog means tackling your most challenging task first thing in the morning —and it’s also the one that can have the greatest positive impact on your life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDV1sSoL0_I
May I ask what the best method would be to track this goal?
Thanks!
Hello,
One of the most common advice you’ll come across is measuring inputs, rather than output.
For example, make sure to Beemind starting to eat the frog rather than I have eaten the frog.
Make sure to keep the rythm super low at the beginning. Do not create a myriad of goals, or if you do, set a very low rate that you increase with time.
I’m telling you because I got stung pretty hard by that.
Also, super important: you will generally want to make your goals super low friction. As in, I’ve done it, and I know that Beeminder knows. I’ve done it even though I wasn’t asked, but Beeminder keeps the score. Without automatic data, it sometimes creates paradoxal situations where I want to do something but I’m not required by beeminder, so I won’t.
Your mileage will vary.
I don’t know how I would beemind it. It’s better to have an automatic data source, so, nowadays, I would write a script that uses Toggl or the time I open my computer.
Here’s a way to phrase it: “work at least 5 minutes on a task with the #frog hashtag on Toggl”. You’ll have to write a script to make these 5 minutes not count if you worked on them i.e. after 12am.
(Itried to do similar stuff and ended up badly burned out – with no natural work drive. Make sure that you don’t harm yourself and reevaluate your goals often)
That is really cool!
Is there a way to configure Beeminder:
“I worked on my frog for at least 1 hour before 11 AM”
Or I guess I need to be more strict with myself.
P.s I like how you say it is better to collect goals on a more automated way.
Thanks
You can use deadlines, but in my experience, it doesn’t work super well, even when entering data manually. Because sometimes I forgot 
If you have good willpower, and can easily track the time you started working on the frog, then that might be a good solution 
Let me know what you ended up with, maybe I’ll create a goal again too
Toggl goals work well for just tracking time—you can create a “frog” tag in toggl or something. That being said, this is total time. There are ways to automate something that will check if there is at least 1 hour in a given day but this will require some programming effort, I don’t think there’s a good way to do it without programming it yourself. (…I think? I haven’t really been keeping track of what meta-goal options are available now) So I think just entering a 1 manually is best to start with, yeah.
You could also use TaskRatchet to track a goal like this–hook up your beeminder account, and use something like &find-frogs to post to a find-frogs goal on creation, and *eat-frogs to post to a eat-frogs goal on task completion. So your TaskRatchet task would be something like:
Finish specific really important task today &find-frogs *eat-frogs
The docs for using Beeminder with TaskRatchet could use some help, but here they are:
Disclosure: I built TaskRatchet.
Interesting problem.
I think something like integration that checks „if today there’s at least one done task with label frog” for your favourite todo app would be great, with rate 4/7.
I’ll set it up for myself and let you know if it works in 2-3 weeks.
I use things 3 plus iOS shortcuts that run automatically at 8 pm. The Shortcut config goes like this. I know it is in Spanish but it’s easy to figure out:
Find task with label that was done today, if your search has results add a datapoint to beeminder goal.
It is doable for most of the popular todo apps.
Now I have to plan at least some frogs each week, but this is not any extra overhead for me. I do weekly planning in things anyway.
I track it beenary way, because my frogs are like that. I have to do many annoying errands related to my new house etc. If your frog is to prepare for an exam, then tracking time is much better of course.
Hi All,
So, the solution I am testing right now is as follows.
A. I use https://bossasaservice.com/ for validation.
B. And https://www.timedoctor.com/ for data input.
C. Manual screenshots and emails to my boss to bridge the gap.
What happens is:
done!
You could probably replace the above with Toggle, Asana harvest, or any other time management software. The only demerit to this solution is a lot of screenshots, but I’m pretty handy with Snagit (which could be substituted with snippy or other screenshot solution).
I’ve set beeminder to fine me $5 bucks everytime I don’t eat a frog with my boss as the person who makes the call if I pass or not (sometimes she is lenient, but recently she has been hard on me).
I might play around with increasing the beeminder fine later, as maybe, the fear of losing money will be higher than the fear of eating the frog?
Overall, I am liking this. Eating frogs is heavy emotional labour that is very easy to put off. I really liked @sheik suggesting to bind it to time and low friction, and that has solved the issue where most frogs are huge multi day tasks.
I am finding that if I spend 2 hours on the frog, that is usually enough to get me momentum and past the dead inertia. But if I don’t get past inertia, at least I am spending 2 hours on the frog, which is still a huge win as they usually taste terrible. I am also finding that sending my daily report to my boss give me a good dopamine hit, so this system is working better than I thought.
I’ll get back to you guys after another 2 weeks of this system.
That said, I’ve eaten several terrible disgusting frogs this week, and I’m really proud of that. If you are curious what frog I am eating this week, it was invoicing, cancelling a contract with a vendor, writing standard operating procedures. All not fun for me.
Hi All,
As an update. This week I’ve scared myself out of doing the daily frog a couple times.
I either left it at the very last thing to do at the day (which defeats the purpose).
Or not done it all (worst case).
To get around this I am trying “Spend 30 minutes before 10 AM doing today’s frog” which is tracked by Timedoctor and Boss As a Service for data verification.
So far, this seems to be working better. I find that if I spend 30 mins doing it, I get over negative momentum, and my body things “this isn’t THAT scary” and I end up doing an hour, or sometimes many hours more.
At worst case, I spent 30 mins on a task I hate and feel proud for the rest of the day.
Thanks
How are you doing? Is this setup still working fine for you?
I look for an alternative, I’m thinking about beeminding task points - at the beginning of each week assign a value on urgency or importance or difficulty of tasks to do and then commit to complete amount of points (this could be one task or 10 tasks, but always 20 points).
My problem is that stuff is not getting done, the task can sometimes take 1h (review a document) to complete, sometimes 5 mins (send an email) and it’s not helpful. Also, what is frog is unclear: everything became a 
.
