< Go Back How to Eat an Elephant … Posted: May 19, 2016 One of the first steps to eliminating procrastination is to break the task down in to bite-sized chunks. The reason is that the biggest trigger of procrastination is when the task seems so large or demanding that it becomes overwhelming. When one big task seems a mammoth to tackle a simple solution to make it seem easier on the mind is to break it down into bite-sized chunks. For example, if you are faced with having to start a big task which is likely to take you 4 hours to complete try breaking it up into (say) 12 x 20 minute bite-sized jobs. It s now much easier to start because you can easily polish off a couple of 20-minute jobs and suddenly that impossibly large task is started and well underway.
Once you ve got started and made some progress the feel-good factor kicks in and creates the psychological effect of wanting to do more. Now that mammoth task seems much more reasonable and very manageable. The trick is simply to concentrate on one chunk at a time, get that done and then move on to the next one.
And the elephant? Just s tart with a toe and then gradually eat it all, one chunk at a time!