Eat the Frog

Learn how to assign frogs to tasks and when to do it

Christina avatar
Written by Christina
Updated over a week ago

The "eat that frog" strategy lets you assign one of three types of frogs to your tasks.

How to assign frogs to tasks

To assign a frog you to a task you can either 

  • click on the edit icon (cog) and pick a frog at the bottom

  • add a frog with the * shortcut

  • or (day view only) click on the area to the left of a task where the frog appears to cycle through the frogs

What are the frogs for?

The frogs are a play on the famous saying: "If you have to eat a frog today, you should do it first thing in the morning"

It's a popular productivity methodology to identify a task that you are dreading but that is important and get it out of the way first thing in the morning.

In Marvin you can use the frogs in different ways. The idea is to assign a dread level to a task. The more you dread doing a tasks the bigger the frog it gets. 

This can be helpful to become more aware of which tasks are at risk of being procrastinated.

When should I assign the frogs?

Depending on how you use the frog strategy, you can assign a frog when you first create a tasks or you can assign frogs to your daily tasks before you get to work on it. 

What do the three different frogs mean?

There are three types of frogs you can choose from:

  • baby frog (pink) -> small dread

  • regular frog (green) -> medium dread

  • big toad (brown) -> high dread

those are the three "levels" of frogs. 

Turning on/off the frog reminder

Depending on how you use the frog strategy it might be helpful to get reminded daily to assign your frogs so you can tackle those first. 

In the strategy settings you can turn on a reminder and a frog will pop up every day in your day view to tell you to assign your frogs. 

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