Step 1: Swallow the frog
Happy Sunday readers! Welcome back to another edition of Brendan Stec’s Essays.
When the psychologist Robert Boice studied the productivity of academic writers, he found that consistency of effort mattered more than quantity of effort. The most productive writers returned to their craft every single day, even if they could only spare 10 minutes. Surprisingly, they often outperformed writers who dedicated more overall time.
The most productive writers made another important decision that set them apart from their peers. They chose to be consistent at doing what I call their job’s “keystone work”: writing. Writing was the work that the rest of their job depended upon, so they made sure not to let any ancillary work crowd it out.
The lesson: don’t just be consistent. Be consistent with your most important work.
Academic writers should write each day
Salespeople should sell each day
Entrepreneurs should tackle the biggest risk to their business each day
Engineers should build each day
Anything else comes second.
What’s funny is that keystone work is usually the work we don’t feel like doing. It can be challenging, stressful, or fraught with ambiguity. Sometimes, it’s even terrifying. You almost want an excuse not to do it! Why not answer a few emails instead? The desk could sure use another wipe down. And there’s that training that involves clicking “Next” a hundred times.
As Paul Graham put it:
“The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.”
And the fake work is endless—and sneaky. It feels productive. It’s easy. It’s mildly rewarding. But it also succeeds in something else: delaying your keystone work. Your precious mason jar of time gets filled with tiny pebbles—meetings, emails, events—and then there’s no room left for the big rock.
The next time you're feeling overwhelmed by your keystone work, it’s helpful to remember two things.
First, the most productive writers from Boice’s study didn’t work the longest hours. They didn’t do it all in one day, or even one week. They chipped away at their keystone work a little bit each day. They followed Mark Twain’s maxim:
"If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first."
Second, remember that keystone work is the work your customers, patients, users, and co-workers count on you to do. They count on you because it really matters—and because it’s the hard, froggy thing that most others find too frightening, too difficult, or too gnarly to swallow.
Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a good start to your week.
See you next time!
-Brendan
A very insightful article. I like the analogy to eat the frog.