Eat the frog order
Score Draft annual report at 9, Prepare board slides at 7 and Reply to routine emails at 2, and the report comes first as your frog while the emails go last. Ties keep your original order. Free in your browser.
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Run — free
Eat the frog is the productivity rule that says you should tackle your hardest, most energy-draining task first, before the day fills with easier work and interruptions. Teams, coaches, and personal planners often score each item on a simple difficulty scale and then need a stable order that puts the highest score at the top of the morning list. This task order by difficulty calculator accepts a list of tasks with numeric difficulty scores, sorts them hardest first with stable tie-breaking, and returns the full ranked sequence plus a frog field naming the single hardest item.
What eat-the-frog ordering means and why hardest comes first
Eat the frog is a metaphor popularized by Brian Tracy from a Mark Twain quip: if you must eat a live frog, do it first thing in the morning so the worst is behind you. In modern work systems the frog is not a random unpleasant chore; it is the task with the highest difficulty, cognitive load, or dread relative to the rest of today’s list.
Sorting by difficulty descending encodes that habit as a reproducible rule: the item with the largest score becomes rank one, the next-hardest becomes rank two, and so on until the easiest work sits at the bottom. When two tasks share the same score, the original input order is preserved so re-running the same list never shuffles ties. Unlike an Eisenhower matrix, which classifies one item by urgency and importance into do, schedule, delegate, or delete, eat-the-frog ordering assumes you already have a multi-item backlog and only need a difficulty-first sequence.
Unlike a debt snowball, which orders balances and rates for payoff psychology, this capability is about work tasks and energy, not money. Use it when the decision you care about is which hard thing leads the day, not which quadrant a single ticket belongs in.
Where hardest-first ordering helps most
Product and engineering managers score sprint candidates by effort or complexity and need a single source of truth that lists the hardest tickets first for morning focus blocks and bot-driven daily plans. Executive assistants and chief-of-staff tools collect a short list of commitments with a one-to-ten hard score and must print an eat-the-frog agenda without reimplementing sort rules in every spreadsheet. Coaching platforms and productivity courses teach the frog metaphor and need a deterministic oracle for drills, widgets, and homework checks that match the published hardest-first rule.
Content sites that rank for task order by difficulty calculator or eat the frog order benefit from a live free tool whose browser path matches the paid path. Failed validation does not consume balance.
What you can do with it
Morning focus and daily planning
Sort today’s scored tasks hardest first so the frog leads the calendar block before easier busywork fills the inbox.
Sprint and backlog focus lists
Turn effort or complexity scores on tickets into a stable eat-the-frog sequence for standups and bot-generated daily plans.
Coaching drills and productivity courses
Give learners a deterministic hardest-first oracle that matches the eat-the-frog lesson without hand-sorting each example.
FAQ
How does the eat the frog task order work?
Send a non-empty tasks array with a finite difficulty on each item.
What scale should I use for difficulty?
Any finite number works. Common choices are 1–10 or 0–100. Higher means harder.
What happens if two tasks share the same difficulty?
Re-running the same list never shuffles equal scores.
How is this different from an Eisenhower matrix?
Eisenhower maps one item’s urgency and importance into do, schedule, delegate, or delete. Eat-the-frog ordering ranks many tasks by difficulty score so the hardest work comes first.
How many tasks can I sort at once?
Between one and one hundred. An empty list is rejected, and a task without a name receives a stable numbered label so the order still reads clearly.
Related tools
For developers — API access
Everything on this page is available programmatically. This section is for teams who want to wire it into their own systems; everyone else can just use the tool above.
API endpoint
Prefer to automate it? One authenticated POST creates the task; the result comes back by webhook or a signed link. The same capability also runs here on the web, by email and from Telegram — and soon from our app too.
Call it from your stack
curl -X POST https://api.kit.forhosting.com/biz/eat-the-frog-order \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KIT_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"tasks":[{"name":"Draft annual report","difficulty":9},{"name":"Reply to routine emails","difficulty":2},{"name":"Prepare board slides","difficulty":7}]}'const res = await fetch("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/biz/eat-the-frog-order", {
method: "POST",
headers: {
"Authorization": `Bearer ${process.env.KIT_KEY}`,
"Content-Type": "application/json"
},
body: JSON.stringify({
"tasks": [
{
"name": "Draft annual report",
"difficulty": 9
},
{
"name": "Reply to routine emails",
"difficulty": 2
},
{
"name": "Prepare board slides",
"difficulty": 7
}
]
})
});
const { task_id } = await res.json();import os, requests
res = requests.post(
"https://api.kit.forhosting.com/biz/eat-the-frog-order",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['KIT_KEY']}"},
json={
"tasks": [
{
"name": "Draft annual report",
"difficulty": 9
},
{
"name": "Reply to routine emails",
"difficulty": 2
},
{
"name": "Prepare board slides",
"difficulty": 7
}
]
},
)
task_id = res.json()["task_id"]<?php
$res = file_get_contents("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/biz/eat-the-frog-order", false, stream_context_create([
"http" => [
"method" => "POST",
"header" => "Authorization: Bearer " . getenv("KIT_KEY") . "\r\nContent-Type: application/json",
"content" => '{"tasks":[{"name":"Draft annual report","difficulty":9},{"name":"Reply to routine emails","difficulty":2},{"name":"Prepare board slides","difficulty":7}]}',
],
]));
$task = json_decode($res, true);body := bytes.NewBufferString(`{"tasks":[{"name":"Draft annual report","difficulty":9},{"name":"Reply to routine emails","difficulty":2},{"name":"Prepare board slides","difficulty":7}]}`)
req, _ := http.NewRequest("POST", "https://api.kit.forhosting.com/biz/eat-the-frog-order", body)
req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+os.Getenv("KIT_KEY"))
req.Header.Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
res, _ := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)Example request
{
"tasks": [
{
"name": "Draft annual report",
"difficulty": 9
},
{
"name": "Reply to routine emails",
"difficulty": 2
},
{
"name": "Prepare board slides",
"difficulty": 7
}
]
}Example response
{
"task_id": "tsk_a1b2c3d4e5f6a1b2c3d4e5f6",
"type": "biz.eat_the_frog_order",
"status": "queued",
"_links": {
"result": "/tasks/tsk_…/result"
}
}The API is asynchronous: the call returns a task_id immediately and the result arrives by webhook. Polling is capped at 1 req/s per task.
Pricing
Published price — no tokens, no invented credits. A failed task is never charged.
Errors
| HTTP | Code | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
401 | unauthorized | Missing or invalid API key. |
402 | insufficient_balance | Your balance doesn't cover the task price. |
404 | unknown_type | That task type doesn't exist. |
429 | rate_limited | Too many requests. Use the webhook instead of polling. |
Technical notes
The same pure analytic path powers the free browser tool and the paid API, so standup bots, weekly review templates, and coaching apps never disagree on which ticket should lead the day when difficulty scores are already known.
What eat-the-frog ordering means and why hardest comes first
Difficulty is a number you already assigned—often one through ten for personal plans, or zero through one hundred for portfolio scoring—not something this endpoint invents from free text.
Input contract, response fields, and validation rules
The array must contain between one and one hundred objects. Example: Draft annual report at difficulty nine, Reply to routine emails at two, and Prepare board slides at seven yields frog Draft annual report, then board slides, then emails. Difficulty values are rounded to six decimal places for stable goldens across runtimes. POST a JSON body with one required array field: tasks (aliases list, items, todos). Each object requires difficulty (aliases score, hard_score, level), a finite number; higher values mean harder work. Optional name (aliases label, title) is a short string; when missing or blank after trim, a stable Task N label is assigned from the zero-based index. Empty arrays, non-arrays, missing difficulty, and non-finite scores fail with invalid_input and are not billed. On success the body returns task_count; max_difficulty and min_difficulty across the list; frog as the rank-one object with rank, name, difficulty, and original_index; order as the full ranked array in eat-the-frog sequence; method set to eat_the_frog; and a short English summary that names the leading task. The endpoint does not estimate hours, parse free-text priority language, or combine urgency flags; call it when scores are already decided and you need a deterministic hardest-first order.
Where a difficulty-first task order API earns its keep
Personal productivity apps and Notion-style templates call a tiny parse endpoint so the free browser path and automation webhooks stay byte-aligned on the same pure module.
Technical questions
What does the task order by difficulty calculator cost?
The browser tool is free. API requests use prepaid KIT balance at $0.002 per successful call; invalid input is not billed.