So, folks have been asking me about this “Carol Cena” thing I mentioned offhand a while back. It wasn’t anything official, just a weird little system I tried out for managing my own small projects for a bit. Thought I’d share how that went down.
It started pretty simply. I was drowning in sticky notes and half-finished lists for a personal coding project I was tinkering with on weekends. Just couldn’t keep track of what I’d done, what was next, and all the little bugs I kept finding. A friend mentioned this method, calling it the “Carol Cena” approach – no idea where the name came from, sounded funny, but the idea seemed straightforward enough.
Basically, the core idea I grasped was: break everything down into the tiniest possible steps. Like, super tiny. Not just “write function X,” but “declare variable Y for function X,” “write loop for function X,” “test loop edge case 1,” etc. Then, you were supposed to handle them strictly one by one. No jumping around.
Trying it Out
So, I grabbed a plain notebook. Didn’t want to mess with new apps or anything. I listed out every single tiny step I could think of for adding one specific feature to my project. Felt kinda ridiculous listing things like “open the file” or “save the file,” but I stuck with it.
The first few hours were… weird. I’d finish a tiny task, cross it off. Felt good, like progress. But it was slow. Like, really slow. I kept wanting to jump ahead to the more interesting parts, but I forced myself to stick to the list, item by item.
- Started with setting up the basic structure.
- Wrote a tiny piece of logic.
- Wrote a test for just that piece.
- Fixed the test.
- Moved to the next tiny piece.
It was very, very methodical. Almost painfully so.
What Happened Next
After a full weekend using it, I had a few takeaways. On the plus side, I made very steady progress. No big roadblocks because the steps were so small, I could always finish something. And because I tested tiny bits as I went, the final feature was surprisingly stable first time around. Less debugging hell later on.
But man, it felt restrictive. Sometimes a bigger idea would pop into my head while working on a tiny step, and the system basically told me to ignore it until I got to a step related to it. That felt unnatural. Also, planning out every tiny step upfront was a hassle. Sometimes you don’t know the tiny steps until you’re halfway through a bigger one.
Final Thoughts
So, did I stick with the “Carol Cena” thing? Not really, not the whole pure system anyway. It was too rigid for my liking. But I did learn something. I definitely started breaking my tasks down into smaller chunks than before, even if not that granular. And focusing on one thing at a time, more often than not, actually does help me get stuff done with fewer stupid mistakes.
So yeah, that was my little experiment. Maybe bits of it could work for you, maybe not. Just thought I’d share the practical side of trying it out. It wasn’t magic, just a different way to look at getting through a to-do list.
