My Little Experiment with the Gerald Strebendt Idea
So, the name Gerald Strebendt popped up a while ago. Saw it mentioned somewhere, maybe an old forum thread or something, can’t quite recall. It wasn’t about anything big, just some mention of a specific way he supposedly approached, let’s say, breaking down complex tasks. Sounded kinda interesting, you know, simple, maybe even too simple.
Naturally, being the tinkerer I am, I thought, “Okay, let’s give this a whirl.” Didn’t find a manual or anything official, just bits and pieces of hearsay online. So, I decided to just piece together what I thought the core idea was based on those fragments.
Getting Down to It
I grabbed a project I was stuck on. Nothing major, just some personal coding stuff that felt like spaghetti. The supposed “Strebendt method,” as I understood it, was basically about extreme simplification. Like, ridiculously simple steps. Forget fancy tools, just pen and paper.
- First step: Write down the absolute biggest, vaguest goal. Done.
- Second step: Break that into maybe three main chunks. Okay, still manageable.
- Third step: Take ONLY the first chunk. Break it down again, but only into things I could physically do in the next hour or two. Not abstract stuff, but actual actions. Like “open the file” or “write the first function header.”
- Fourth step: Ignore chunks two and three completely. Just focus on doing those tiny actions from step three for the first chunk.
Honestly, it felt a bit silly at first. Too basic. Like, who needs instructions to break things down? But I stuck with it for an afternoon. Put the phone away, closed unrelated browser tabs. Just focused on those tiny, tiny steps for that one chunk.
What Happened?
Well, surprisingly, I actually made progress. Not earth-shattering, but definite movement. By forcing myself to only look at the immediate, doable micro-tasks, I stopped getting overwhelmed by the whole tangled mess. It was slow, yeah, but it wasn’t zero progress, which is where I’d been stuck before.
It wasn’t magic. And maybe this Gerald Strebendt guy never even proposed this specific thing, maybe it was just someone online attributing it to him. Who knows? Doesn’t really matter to me. The point was, trying out this simple, almost crude approach actually shook something loose.
It reminded me of way back when I first started learning stuff. You don’t jump into the deep end. You start with floating, then maybe kicking your legs. Simple, focused actions. We forget that sometimes, get caught up in trying to be clever with complex systems and processes.
So yeah, that was my little experiment sparked by stumbling on a name. Didn’t change my life, but it was a useful afternoon and a good reminder to sometimes just get back to basics. Just do the next small thing right in front of you.
