cart before the horse, don’t put/set the

Don’t  reverse  the  natural order of things. This expression no doubt dates from the time when horses first  were  used  to  draw  wheeled  vehicles,  and  began  to  be  transferred  to other  affairs  almost  immediately. Cicero  accused  Homer  of  doing  so, com- plaining  that  the  Greek  poet  stated  the  moral  of  a  story  before  telling  the story.  From  the  1500s  on,  numerous  English  writers—Sir Thomas  More, William  Shakespeare,  Charles  Kingsley,  to  mention  just  a  few—used  this turn  of  phrase,  which  also  appears  in  Greek,  Latin,  French,  German,  and Italian. In English it was a cliché by the 1700s.