How to Eat an Elephant: A Practical Guide to Tackling Your Biggest Tasks

In productivity circles, the tasks that feel like elephants are the big, sprawling projects you keep bumping to next week. They’re not just to-dos. They’re essentially mini-projects that need a different approach than your average task. Things like:

• Cleaning out the garage
• Deep-cleaning the whole house
• Writing a script for an online course
• Studying for your AWS certification
• Finally launching that personal website
• Getting through the mountain of paperwork on your desk

Elephants rarely get done in a single sitting. A proper deep clean might take a full weekend. Building a site from scratch can stretch into weeks. And the real problem isn’t the work itself — it’s getting started. The scope feels so enormous that it’s just easier to not. So they sit on your list, quietly stressing you out, week after week.

• What Is the “Eat an Elephant” Method?
• Four Tips for Actually Finishing the Elephant

What Is the “Eat an Elephant” Method? 

You’ve heard the old saying: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. That’s exactly where the name comes from.

The method works the same way: break a big task down into small, manageable daily chunks — let’s call them “bites” — and tackle one bite every day until the elephant is gone.

Say you’ve been putting off digitizing your family photo collection. There are around 300 photos that all need to be scanned.

You could try to knock out the whole thing in one go. But two problems hit almost immediately.

1. The sheer scale is paralyzing. Blocking out an entire Saturday to feed photos into a scanner and process them one by one in Lightroom? Most people will find every possible reason to postpone that day indefinitely. Hello, procrastination spiral.
2. It doesn’t fit into a normal schedule. Dedicate the whole day to scanning and everything else falls behind. Don’t, and the elephant never moves.

Now apply the one-bite approach. Break it into one simple recurring task: “Scan 12 photos.”

If you use a task manager, create a separate project for the elephant, add your daily bites, and set them to repeat. Here’s what that looks like:

Suddenly the whole thing feels manageable — for a few reasons.

It fits into your day. Instead of one massive task wrecking your schedule, you’ve got a normal to-do that takes 10–15 minutes and feels great to check off.

It’s no longer scary. Scan 12 photos? That’s nothing. No heroic willpower, no cleared calendar required.

Most importantly — it’s moving. Do your daily bite consistently, and in three to four weeks your entire photo collection is digitized. The task went from an overwhelming blob on your list to something that just... gets done.

Here are a few more examples of how elephants break down into daily bites:

Daily bites aren’t always identical, though. Some elephants are better broken into phases tied to specific dates. Here’s what that might look like for “Prepare a conference talk”:

This approach also works for tasks you never seem to find time for — not just massive projects. Say you’ve been meaning to reorganize your desk for months but can’t carve out a full afternoon. Add a recurring daily task: “Desk (5 minutes).” Do it every day, and it’s handled within a week or two.

Four Tips for Actually Finishing the Elephant 

Starting is one thing. The harder part is not quitting halfway through. Here’s what actually helps.

1. Eliminate the setup friction. The faster you can jump into your daily bite, the more likely you are to do it. Ideally, there’s zero prep required before you start.

   Digitizing photos? Keep the scanner plugged in and ready to go. Writing a course script? Keep the Google Doc open in a pinned tab so it’s the first thing you see when you sit down.

   The goal: you should be able to knock out your bite the moment you have a free 15 minutes.

2. Do it first. This one comes from Mark Forster, a British time management expert and author of Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management. His idea: don’t just do your daily bite — do it before anything else.

   If you’re writing a course script, open that doc before you check Slack, before email, before the daily standup. Only after you’ve completed that day’s bite do you move on to other work.

   Use this for the elephants that absolutely cannot stay stuck — the high-stakes projects where “I’ll get to it later” has been failing you for weeks.

3. Use Pomodoros instead of subtasks. Some elephants are too varied to break into uniform chunks. A home office overhaul or a full product launch involves tasks of wildly different sizes and complexity — you can’t really make them equal.

   In that case, skip trying to define specific subtasks. Instead, commit to a fixed number of focused 25-minute Pomodoro sessions on the elephant each day:

   
   

4. Track it like a habit. Add your elephant work to a habit tracker. Every day you complete your bite, mark it off. It looks something like this:

   

   Seeing your streak builds momentum. It makes skipping a day feel like a real loss — and makes it much easier to stay consistent until the elephant is finally gone.