This sounds a lot like the advice given in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on how to overcome writer's block. In the book, the narrator is teaching a writing course, and a student says she doesn't know what to write about. So he suggests that she pick a building, but not just a building, start with a single brick and describe that, then the next one and so on. She ends up writing voluminously.

This advice of breaking down the problem to its smallest domain of attack has been around for a long time.