Why "what first?" is the whole problem
A long list doesn't fail because the tasks are hard. It fails at the moment of choosing: fifteen items, each one a small decision about whether it matters more than the other fourteen, and the brain quietly declines to make fifteen decisions before breakfast. So it makes none, and the day starts with email. Deciding what goes first is not a step before the work — for most people it is the work that never gets done, and everything else waits behind it.
This page makes that one decision for you, and shows its reasoning so you can overrule it. The rule it follows is the one DuckDoro runs on every morning: find the frog (the task you're avoiding, which is usually the one that matters), add two more that can actually be finished today, and park everything else in writing so it stops circling. If you'd rather sort by hand, one item at a time, the brain dump tool does exactly that. If the frog is named but you still can't start it, First Bite shrinks it to a two-minute move.