Revolutionary France may seem like a strange place to find a life hack, but in the 1790s, the French satirist Nicolas Chamfort offered some stark advice to cope with our daily travails.

“One should swallow a toad every morning, so as not to find anything disgusting for the rest of the day,” he wrote. In other words, start with the thing you dread most, and the following obligations will feel far more pleasant.

Chamfort’s name has largely been forgotten by the English-speaking world, but his unsettling phrase has endured as a popular productivity mantra: “Eat the frog.” The idea has even inspired a best-selling self-help book from the 2000s. But does it actually work?

It is only within the past few years that scientists have investigated the strategy, and they have found that “eating the

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