My Run-in with the Bryson Allen Method
Alright, so I kept hearing this name pop up here and there, “Bryson Allen”. Wasn’t exactly sure who the guy was, maybe some kind of productivity guru or something? People online were mentioning his way of, I guess, tackling tasks or organizing thoughts. Sounded simple enough, maybe too simple.
So, I decided to give it a shot. What did I have to lose, right? My desk was a mess, my to-do list was longer than my arm. Anything seemed worth trying at that point.
First thing I did was grab a plain notebook. The instructions I pieced together seemed to involve just writing down the absolute main thing you needed to do for the day. Right at the top. Big letters. Okay, easy enough. I wrote down “Finish that report draft”.
Then, below that, the “Bryson Allen” idea, as I understood it, was to list only the very next physical action you needed to take. Not the whole project plan, just the next step. So, for me, that was “Open the document file”.
I did that. Opened the file. Felt a bit weird, like, duh, obviously I need to open the file. But I went back to the notebook. Crossed out “Open the document file”. What’s next? “Read the last paragraph I wrote”. Okay. Wrote that down. Went and did it.
- Grabbed my notebook.
- Wrote the main goal: “Finish report draft”.
- Wrote the very next step: “Open document file”.
- Did it.
- Crossed it out.
- Wrote the next step: “Read last paragraph”.
- Did it.
- Crossed it out.
This went on for a bit. It was… interesting. Kinda forced me to stop thinking about the overwhelming whole project and just focus on the tiny, immediate next action. Felt slow, almost childishly simple. But I gotta admit, I wasn’t procrastinating as much. Just doing the tiny thing, crossing it out, writing the next tiny thing.
Ran into a bit of a wall when tasks got more complex, or needed creative thinking rather than just mechanical steps. “Figure out conclusion” isn’t really a single physical action. So, I had to adapt it. Broke it down further: “Scribble ideas for conclusion”, then “Pick best idea”, then “Write first sentence of conclusion”. Still felt a bit forced sometimes.
After about a week, here’s where I landed. The whole “Bryson Allen” thing, or my interpretation of it, wasn’t a magic bullet. Shocker, right? But the core idea – breaking things down into the absolute smallest next step – that part stuck with me. I don’t use the notebook thing quite so rigidly now. It’s too much back-and-forth sometimes. But when I feel stuck or overwhelmed, I mentally ask myself, “Okay, what’s the very next physical thing I need to do?” And usually, just identifying that helps me get moving again.
So yeah, that was my little experiment. Didn’t revolutionize my life, but I picked up a useful little mental trick. Not bad for something I just stumbled across online.
