Naturally, we do what we like first. We experience Laborit’s law, also known by the more evocative name "law of least effort." Defined by Henri Laborit, a 20th-century French surgeon and neurobiologist, it is part of the large family of "time laws." It highlights an observation we all experience daily and points out that our favorite tasks are completed at the expense of more complex ones! In light of this observation, Laborit’s law aims to reverse the order in which tasks are carried out, to encourage us to tackle the more difficult tasks at the beginning of the day.

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Starting with one’s preferences: a natural behavior

If people first turn to what they enjoy, it is because they respond to a natural need: survival in a new environment. To address this, they will seek to:

Achieve immediate satisfaction

Have fun, take pleasure, do what makes them feel calm—that is what they will do enthusiastically. Let’s take the example of a digital communication consultant who has excellent expertise in natural referencing (SEO) but has not yet launched Google AdWords campaigns. Since this channel is unfamiliar, it could put them in difficulty. However, it is an opportunity to develop new skills. Even so, their command of SEO, being one of their strengths, is more likely to steer them first toward completing their inbound marketing tasks.

Avoid stressful situations

A stressful situation is synonymous, for a person, with an uncomfortable moment they cannot fully manage. Because of experience, limiting beliefs, or fear, they will prefer to avoid this stress to remain in their comfort zone.

Highlighting the limits with Laborit’s law

By starting exclusively with their favorite tasks, people will tend to :

Postpone the least appreciated tasks until later

By putting everything off until tomorrow, the day after, and so on, the risk is then never completing the task, or doing it in urgency with poor-quality output. This behavior leads to procrastination: an attitude adopted by a large number of working and non-working people. In the long term, it can give rise to endless to-do lists.

Lose motivation

As a result, an employee in a company who ends up with a long list of tasks will have the feeling of having to do the impossible. Their self-esteem could suffer, which is positive neither for them—since they may lose hope—nor for their managers, who would observe a decline in performance.

Perceive the task as more complex than it is

The task to be completed, or even the accumulation of tasks "outside one’s comfort zone," becomes what is called a mental monster. Feeding on their fear, the individual imagines the worst, which distances them from reality! They thus perceive the task as more complicated than it is and convince themselves that it will bring them no joy, only trouble.

Reversing the order of task execution through simple methods

Condition yourself

Laborit’s law encourages the development of a new habit, namely carrying out your most complex actions at the beginning of the day. By starting the morning with a task initially viewed as "intimidating," what follows seems simpler by comparison. Mark Twain, an American writer, humorist, and entrepreneur, explains in his book Eat That Frog in the Morning: "If you complete your most difficult task first thing in the morning when you arrive, everything else that happens to you during the day will be positive." A way of seeing life through rose-colored glasses with ultimately the same resources but a different organization!

Plan your day

Depending on all the tasks to be completed, it may be useful to build a difficulty grid in which complex actions are listed. This table would then function as a basis for identifying the best order of the day’s tasks to follow.

Put so-called "complex" tasks into perspective

Let’s not blame complexity, because it offers advantages. Nothing says that a difficult task requires spending several hours, days, or weeks on it. Why would it necessarily take more time than another? You can be comfortable with a task that requires several hours or days of thought, and paradoxically feel uncomfortable with another requiring only 30 minutes of thought! The duration and perceived difficulty of a task can therefore be uncorrelated with one another.

Get support while you get into the habit

If completing your tasks alone seems out of reach, this means support when starting an activity is probably preferable. Colleagues who have already completed these tasks will more easily understand the difficulties currently experienced by the employee. These privileged exchanges with them can reassure them and prove the feasibility of their task.

Reward yourself when completing a difficult task

To maintain motivation in their core role, an employee can reward themselves once they have fully closed out a complex task (or partially, if it spans several days). Rewards can take various forms: taking a break, personal time, a snack, self-congratulation, etc. It is up to each person to find their own reward!

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Starting with your "difficult" tasks—this is a new habit you should adopt. Admittedly, it goes against natural behavior. Moreover, by keeping this reflex, tasks risk being postponed repeatedly, and ultimately being completed (or not completed) with execution that is too rushed and imprecise. Changing your routine and conditioning yourself to reverse the order are preferable. To do this, planning your day, reframing apparent difficulty, support from mentors, and establishing reward rituals can be key.

Now it’s your turn! Identify one task that you put off too often and set yourself a time slot (ideally in the morning) to complete it, and commit to sticking to it.