Tips to track "Eat that frog"... Frog of the day

Newbee
9

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:

  1. On the previous night, I send my boss my frog for the day for tommorow.
  2. The next day, I load up time doctor and a freestyle task that has the task name prefixed with frog
  3. I have told my boss as a service that I will “pass” if the frog task is the first entry in my timedoctor, and I have logged at least 2 hours to that frog task (or completed it)
  4. At the end of the day, I email my boss a screenshot of my Timedoctor log, highlighting that the frog task was the first entry of the day, with a total of 2 hours+. I also send a screenshot of the work in progress of the frog task. Because of my descriptive naming convention, my boss can match the screenshot to the text description and validate that I have made progress.

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.

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