Do the Hardest Thing First — Always Be Working Toward Easier

Do the hardest thing first. Move the heaviest thing first is like it. Always be working towards easier.

“Eat a live frog every morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” ~ Mark Twain

Here is a link to fellow Medium writer, Saimadhu Polamuri’s, book review on the business productivity tome, Eat That Frog, by Brian Tracy. You can read it to learn more about the business and productivity applications of this principle.

But I didn’t learn the concept of doing the hardest, least pleasant thing, first, from Mark Twain, Brian Tracy, or Saimadhu. I got it from building houses with my Uncle Kurt.

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On a construction site, the lowest person on the totem pole is a “grunt.” Grunts get the dirty jobs, and the unskilled ones, like hauling lumber. But there’s still a right and wrong way to do even unskilled work.

Carrying and crowning boards

My uncle taught me how to identify the board types by width and length. He taught me how to crown dimensional lumber, too. Crowning involves quickly sighting down the length of a board to see which way it curves. No piece of lumber is perfectly straight. I marked the edge of the board at one end with my carpenter’s pencil, jabbing out a quick inverted “V” called a carrot, with the point touching the crowned side of the board.

Once marked, I carried the boards to where they would be sawed or used. My uncle taught me to carry the heaviest, longest boards first. I worked my way through a lumber pile exactly like this each time we received a delivery.

Simple Logic

My uncle’s rationale made perfect sense to me.

He asked, “Are you going to be more or less tired after carrying the first board?”

“More,” I said.

“Right,” agreed my uncle, “then don’t you want to carry the lightest boards when you’re the least tired?”

“Yes, sir,” I allowed.

And so that’s the way I did it. I carried the heaviest boards the furthest distance, reserving my strength and knowing each trip to the lumber pile was getting easier.

That’s the way I’ve tackled life ever since. I do the hardest thing first. Then every subsequent thing feels a little easier. I’m always working towards the next easiest thing. Working this way shrinks a huge stack of lumber, and it shrinks problems, and it helps you give your best to your least favorite necessities. You should try it, too. Do the hardest thing first, everything is easier from there on.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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