So, I hit a real wall a few weeks back. Had this massive project looming, you know the type. Just couldn’t get started. Felt like wading through mud. Tried all the usual tricks – Pomodoro, detailed lists, breaking it down – none of it was clicking. I was just stuck, staring at the screen, getting nothing done.
Then I stumbled across this technique, someone mentioned it in passing, called the ‘dale pruitt’ method, or something like that. Sounded a bit folksy, maybe named after some old guy who figured things out. No idea about the real origin, didn’t care much either. Point was, I was desperate, so I thought, what the heck, let’s give this ‘dale pruitt’ thing a try.
My Process with ‘dale pruitt’
The whole idea, as I understood it, was kinda backwards. Instead of starting at the beginning, you look at the very end goal, and then you find the absolute smallest, easiest, tiniest piece of work you can do right now, even if it feels completely out of order. The key is ‘easiest’.
So, I took my big project – let’s say it was writing a huge report. Normally, I’d start with an outline, then the introduction. Boring, and felt overwhelming.
With this ‘dale pruitt’ approach, I tried something different:
- First, I didn’t even think about the intro. I thought about the finished report. What’s the very last step before it’s done? Maybe hitting ‘Save As PDF’. Okay, too simple.
- Before that? Checking the page numbers are correct. Hmm, still feels like part of a bigger task.
- What about finding that one specific statistic I needed for the conclusion section? Yeah, that felt small enough. Didn’t require much brainpower, just some quick searching.
So, I started just by finding that single statistic. Took me maybe ten minutes. It felt… odd. Like I wasn’t really working on the report. But crossing that tiny thing off my mental list gave me a little jolt.
Then I looked for the next smallest, easiest thing. Maybe formatting one picture I knew I needed. Did that. Then finding the email with the data source for section 3. Did that too. It was all disjointed, jumping around the document plan.
How it Felt and What Happened
Honestly, it felt really weird at first. My brain kept telling me, “This is inefficient! Go back to the outline! Start properly!”. It felt chaotic, like I was just tinkering around the edges.
But the thing is, I wasn’t getting blocked. Each tiny task was so easy, there was no reason to procrastinate on it. And slowly, these little pieces started adding up. Checking off these micro-tasks built some momentum. Suddenly, tackling a slightly bigger chunk, like writing a paragraph for section 2 using the data I’d already found, didn’t seem so scary.
It bypassed that big initial hurdle, that feeling of “Oh god, where do I even start?”. Before I knew it, I had lots of little bits done, scattered throughout the project. Then it was just a matter of connecting the dots, filling in the gaps. It wasn’t necessarily faster overall, but it broke the deadlock. The project actually got finished, which was the main thing.
Final Thoughts
So, this ‘dale pruitt’ thing… is it some magic bullet? Nah, probably not. Might just be a fancy name for finding small wins to trick your brain into getting started. It felt kinda clunky for simple stuff.
But for those big, intimidating projects where you feel completely stuck? Yeah, I might actually use it again. It helped me get moving when nothing else did. Sometimes it’s not about having the perfect system, it’s just about finding whatever weird little trick gets the engine started. This was my trick for that project.
