# Chapter 103

“eating the toad for breakfast.”

This is not original with me, I read it somewhere, but forgot to write the author down and give credit. It’s the idea of doing the most difficult part of your day early in the day, then its all easier downhill from there. The toad being the hard thing, and breakfast being your morning of course, and eating it is getting it finished or accomplished or the proper amount of progress completed on that toad. Sorry if you think me anal for explaining an obvious metaphor, but when I shared it with someone else, nothing about the metaphor was clear nor obvious to them. I don’t know where you are at on this sliding scale.

But lets talk about doing hard things first in your day. This is not the only way to do it, but it seems to be the way that helps most of the people most of the time. I spent years crafting systems that allow me to knock out the toads and the MIT’s first thing in the morning. Toads will be most important thing, the MIT’s. For me, it was more MIT’s getting the priority that they needed in my life.

Interestingly enough, right at the moment, I am trashing all those systems and working an outside job in the mornings, and trying to adjust to MIT’s in the afternoons . . . and now things are falling through the cracks, and I will have to try something new, a different system, so that the MIT’s get done and I can accomplish all that needs to be finished. This is my toad.