When Small Game Hunting Becomes Your Day Job

Small game hunting isn't glamorous. No magazine covers, no high-end gear sponsorships. But for a lot of us, it's the backbone of a hunting year. I've spent more February afternoons in frozen cornfields than I can count, waiting for a rabbit to break cover. And honestly? That's where the real learning happens. You learn to read sign, to move slow, to shut up and listen. This isn't a step-by-step manual—there are plenty of those. Instead, think of this as a field guide to the trade-offs, the dumb mistakes, and the small victories that actually matter.

Where Small Game Hunting Shows Up in Real Work

The actual role small game plays in a hunter's year

Small game hunting isn't the main event for most people—it's the undercard that keeps you in the woods when nothing bigger is moving. I have seen hunters burn out waiting for elk season, then realize they spent six months staring at trail camera photos instead of actually hunting. That's where rabbits, squirrels, and upland birds save the year. You get the same stalking, the same shooting pressure, the same field-to-table satisfaction, but with dramatically lower stakes. The catch is that most people treat small game as a warm-up drill, something to do until the "real" season opens. Wrong order. Small game is the backbone of a hunting calendar that doesn't collapse after two weeks in November. It builds woodsmanship you can't learn from podcasts, and it costs a fraction of a big game trip. You'll shoot more, miss more, and learn faster than any single week of guided elk hunting.

How it differs from big game: time, cost, success rates

A single deer hunt can eat three days of scouting, a full weekend of sitting, and maybe one shot. Small game lets you pull the trigger ten times in an afternoon. The economics are brutal if you compare them head-to-head: a big game tag alone can run hundreds of dollars, while a small game license often costs less than a tank of gas. But here's the trap—people apply big game thinking to small game. They over-scout, over-gear, and over-plan. What usually breaks first is the willingness to just go. You don't need a spotting scope, a 4WD truck, or three layers of camouflage. You need boots, a shotgun or .22, and permission to walk a piece of ground. That simplicity feels wrong to hunters raised on gear catalogs. I have watched new hunters buy $600 jackets before they ever shot a squirrel, then quit when the first cold morning didn't feel Instagram-worthy. Small game rewards showing up, not showing out.

Land access realities: public vs. permission-based

Here's the hard truth most big game hunters won't say aloud: public land is getting hammered. Draw odds shrink every year. Private leases cost what a used car does. Small game sidesteps this mess because the bar is lower. You can hunt rabbits on a 10-acre patch behind a strip mall if you ask the owner. Permission-based access works better for small game because landowners don't fear you'll scare off their trophy buck. Worth flagging—this isn't permission to be sloppy. Knock on doors, offer to share meat, and never leave a gate open. The trade-off is that your hunting spots will be smaller, closer to roads, and less dramatic. That hurts if you're chasing scenery. But if you want to hunt every weekend instead of twice a season, those scrappy permission patches are gold. Most teams skip this: they dream of mountain hunts while ignoring the 40-acre farm they drive past every day. Small game lives in the overlooked margins—and that's exactly why it works.

Foundations Readers Confuse: What You Actually Need

Gear that matters vs. gear that collects dust

Walk into any small-game hunting forum and you'll see new hunters decked out like they're staging a coup: rangefinders, thermal scopes, custom calls, and enough camo patterns to outfit a platoon. The catch? Most of that gear sits in the truck bed while the real work happens with three things you probably already own. I've spent enough mornings watching beginners fumble with a $400 caller while a rabbit sits thirty yards away—spooked by the electronic whine. What you actually need: a decent side-by-side or over-under (pump actions jam when you're cold and rushed), a single quality knife that holds an edge through six rabbits, and boots that don't blister after four miles. That's it. The rest—the fancy rangefinders, the suppressors, the GPS dog collars with heart-rate monitors—that's gear that collects dust. Or worse, gear that distracts you from the only thing that matters: putting meat in the bag. Trade-off: light gear means you move faster and quieter; heavy gear means you get tired at mile two and your dog finds game you never saw.

Reading sign: the skill that separates luck from consistency

Most beginners stare at the woods like they're waiting for a rabbit to raise its hand. Wrong order. You don't hunt rabbits—you hunt where rabbits have been. Fresh droppings that still hold moisture. Bark stripped low on saplings—two feet off the ground tells you a cottontail, three feet says a hare. Matted down grass trails no wider than your hand, weaving under blackberry tangles. One afternoon I watched a new hunter walk past four active runs, then complain the land was empty. The sign was there—he just didn't know the alphabet. Reading sign isn't glamorous. It's slow. You stop. You kneel. You touch the ground and guess how old that track is. But it's the skill that turns a lucky afternoon into a reliable system. That sounds fine until you're shivering in January wind, tempted to skip the inspection and just walk the field. Don't. The difference between a skunked day and a full game bag is usually thirty seconds of reading the dirt.

Dog breeds and their actual capabilities (not just breed hype)

Here's where the internet lies to you hardest. Every breed forum will tell you their favorite dog can hunt anything—beagles for rabbits, labs for waterfowl, curs for squirrel. Reality is messier. A beagle will run a rabbit in circles for hours but won't retrieve from thick cover. A lab will retrieve all day but can't track a cold trail through snow. And that "versatile" breed the breeder sold you? It does two things adequately and nothing well.

'The best small-game dog I ever owned was a mutt that didn't know it was supposed to specialize. It just found game and came back.'

— retired guide, private conversation, October 2022

The trick is matching the dog to the style of hunting you actually do. Walking fencerows with thick brush? You need a dog that stays close, not one that runs a mile and barks. Hunting open fields? A beagle's voice lets you track the chase without seeing it. Most beginners buy the breed that won a YouTube tournament, then spend three seasons fighting the dog's instincts instead of using them. Don't be that person. Watch the dog work before you buy the hype.

Patterns That Usually Work (If You Stick to Them)

Spot-and-stalk for rabbits and hares

You spot a rabbit at forty yards, feeding at the edge of a clearing. The wind is quartering toward you. You drop to a crouch, move when it's eating, freeze when it lifts its head. Two minutes later you're inside twenty-five yards and the shot is yours. That's the pattern—and it fails spectacularly the moment you rush. I have watched otherwise competent hunters blow a stalk because they thought they could close the last ten yards in three seconds. Wrong move. The rabbit hears the shift of gravel, the click of a boot sole, and it's gone into the briars. What works is patience measured in breaths, not seconds. Move only when the animal's head goes down to feed. Stop completely when it looks up. That rhythm—feed, lift, freeze—is your only window.

The trade-off is time. A good stalk might take fifteen minutes to cover fifty yards. In thick cover you might only get one real opportunity per hour. That feels inefficient, especially when you're used to drumming up game fast. But I have seen a single well-executed stalk produce more meat than three rushed attempts that spooked every rabbit in a quarter-mile radius. Consistency beats flash. The pattern works because it respects the animal's defense—a rabbit's hearing is better than your eyesight. You don't outsmart them; you out-wait them.

'The worst stalkers I know are the ones who think they can outthink a rabbit. You can't. You just have to out-sit one.'

— old-timer I met in the high desert, glassing a sage flat

Sitting water for squirrels and doves

Find a water source in dry country and you've found the day's office. Squirrels come mid-morning, doves flood in at dusk, and if you're set up wrong you'll spend the whole time watching them laugh at you from a branch forty yards away. The pattern is simple: pick a spot with cover that puts the sun at your back and the water at your front. The tricky bit is wind direction—squirrels circle downwind before they commit, and a single whiff of your coffee breath sends them into the canopy for an hour. I've learned to arrive ninety minutes before peak activity, sit still, and let the animals forget I exist. You don't need calls, you don't need decoys, you don't need a blind. You need stillness and a willingness to wait until your legs fall asleep.

Not every small checklist earns its ink.

Not every small checklist earns its ink.

Most teams skip the preparation. They walk in at noon, crunch through dry leaves, and wonder why every dove flared at fifty yards. The catch is that sitting water rewards patience you don't feel in the moment. Nothing happens for forty minutes—then a dove materializes out of the sky, wings set, and you have maybe three seconds before it sees you and banks away. Miss that window and you wait another thirty minutes. That hurts. I keep a small notebook in my vest now, record the time of first arrivals, the direction they come from, how long after sundown the action stops. Two seasons of that data turned a frustrating hobby into a consistent pattern. No magic, just repetition and a few notes.

Using dogs effectively: flushing vs. pointing breeds

If you hunt with a dog, you're not hunting alone—you're hunting in tandem with a creature that processes scent differently than you process sight. Flushing breeds, like springers and cockers, work close. They quarter the ground ahead of you, push birds up within gun range, and rely on you to be ready the instant the flush happens. Pointing breeds, like setters and pointers, go farther, lock up on scent, and wait for you to walk in and flush the bird yourself. Both patterns work. What usually breaks first is the human. You can't push a flusher into a hot cover and then lag ten steps behind—the bird flushes wild and you get a running shot at best. You can't walk past a point and expect the dog to hold forever—she breaks, the bird flushes early, and you're shooting at a blur.

The pattern that works is commitment. Decide which style you're running that day and stick to it. I once hunted behind a friend who switched mid-morning: he let his pointing dog hunt like a flusher because he was impatient, and the dog ended up confused, bumping birds thirty yards out and looking back at him like what now? We fixed it by stopping, sitting down, and letting the dog reset. Took twenty minutes. After that, the dog pointed solidly and we shot three woodcock within an hour. The lesson: a dog's pattern is only as reliable as your own. If you drift, so does the dog. Consistency isn't about having a perfect animal—it's about showing up the same way every time and letting the repetitions build trust. The first time a pointer holds a point for two minutes while you walk in, you'll understand why this pattern survives across centuries. It's not flashy. It's foundational.

Anti-Patterns and Why Teams Revert to Bad Habits

Over-reliance on calls and decoys

You buy the $200 electronic caller, load seventy-two distress sounds, scatter a dozen decoys across the field—and then stand there wondering why every rabbit in the county ghosted you. I have seen this exact scene play out in a dozen hunting parties. The gear whispers a promise: *more calls = more game*. That's not how pressure works. Animals habituate fast. A rabbit that hears the same dying-rabbit loop three times in one morning isn't scared anymore—it's annoyed. The real sin here is mistaking a tool for a tactic. Calls work when you use them sparingly, mix up sequences, and kill the noise the moment an animal locks on. But teams get comfortable. They plant themselves behind the speaker and wait. That's not hunting—that's hoping.

The same problem shows up in software teams: we find one metric that worked once, automate its collection, and stop asking whether it still means anything. The decoy becomes the strategy. What usually breaks first is the feedback loop—you stop reading the field and start trusting the gadget. Worth flagging—experienced hunters know better, yet they still reach for the call first when the morning goes quiet. Why? Because it feels like doing something.

Hunting the same spot every time without rotation

You filled your limit three weekends in a row on the south ridge. So you go back. Fourth weekend? Nothing. Fifth? Still nothing. That spot is now a memory, not a honey hole. Pressure leaves a trace—disturbed cover, shifted feeding times, animals that learn to loop wide around your stand. The pattern is seductive: one successful day becomes your mental model for success forever. But small game adapts faster than your calendar.

I've watched teams run the same deployment cadence for six months, then blame "market conditions" when returns flatline. The ridge wasn't wrong—their rotation was. Rotating requires discipline: you leave a good spot while it's still good, not after it's dead. That hurts. You walk away from guaranteed success today because you know tomorrow's version of you will need a fresh angle. The catch is most people can't stomach that trade-off. They'd rather squeeze one more hunt out of a dying patch than scout three new ones. And that's exactly when the bad habit hardens into policy.

We burned three weeks on the same meadow because last year it saved the season. Last year wasn't this year—and the rabbits knew it before we did.

— field note from a squirrel hunt gone quiet, recalled by a guide who switched spots too late

Pushing too hard in bad weather

Rain, wind, unseasonable heat—every hunter has a threshold they ignore. "Just one more hour," you say, soaked to the bone, shaking from cold, watching nothing move. The bad habit here isn't optimism; it's the belief that effort substitutes for conditions. Small game doesn't feed in a gale. They bunker down. So do your results. Pushing harder when the field says stop doesn't produce game—it produces frustration, sloppy shots, and injuries that cost you weeks.

In product work, this shows up as the death-march sprint: "We'll push through the holiday slump with overtime." That never works. You burn your team's energy fighting wind instead of waiting for the weather to change. The anti-pattern is confusing motion with progress. A good hunter reads the sky and goes home. A good team reads the signal and backs off. The real skill? Knowing which discomfort to lean into—and which to treat as a clear sign to pack up. Most revert to pushing because stopping feels like failure. It's not. It's the only way to last the season.

Maintenance, Drift, and Long-Term Costs

Gun and gear maintenance: what actually breaks

Most hunters baby the rifle and ignore everything else. That's backward. What usually breaks first is the boot seam—mid-season, on a wet ridge, three miles from the truck. I have watched a perfectly good hunt collapse because a guy's daypack zipper gave out and his spare shells rolled into a gully. The scope doesn't fail; the little screw holding the scope ring loosens after forty miles of hiking. Optics fog when you breathe into them wrong. The catch is that gear degrades slowly, so you don't notice until it bites you. A $12 sling swivel snaps, and suddenly you're carrying a rifle by the barrel for two hours. Not fun.

There's a rhythm to it. After every three outings, I strip the bolt, wipe the carbon ring, and check the stock screws. Weirdly, the thing that saves the most hunts is replacing the elastic in my shell vest every spring. That sounds trivial until a pocket lets go and your ammo scatter pattern looks like you sneezed onto the forest floor. Worth flagging—most expensive gear isn't better; it's just heavier. The lightweight tent that lasted one season taught me that lesson.

• Check sling hardware before every trip; it's the first thing to rattle loose
• Replace boot laces at the first fray—don't wait for the snap
• Store optics dry; a humid gun safe is a fog machine waiting to happen

Physical conditioning and injury prevention

Small game hunting doesn't look athletic until your knee gives out on a downhill traverse and you're five hours from cell service. The real cost isn't the hunt you miss—it's the four weeks of PT afterward. I learned this the hard way: carried a forty-pound pack through steep draws for three Saturdays straight, then couldn't walk up stairs for a month. That hurts. The body wears in ways you don't expect: rotator cuffs from glassing uphill, plantar fasciitis from standing in frozen streambeds, lower back blowouts from leaning over to dress animals in awkward positions.

Not every small checklist earns its ink.

Not every small checklist earns its ink.

What actually works? Two things. First, strength training that mimics the load—lunges with a weighted pack, not leg press machines. Second, knowing when to stop. Most injuries happen in the last hour of a long day, when form breaks and judgment goes fuzzy. The trick is calling it before your body forces you to. I've started scheduling an extra rest day after every third trip, and the returns spike—better shots, fewer drops, no ER visits.

A simple rule: if you feel a twinge in the first mile, turn around. That twinge is not weakness; it's your body showing you the bill for last season's overreach.

'The season you skip is cheaper than the surgery you earn by pushing through.'

— overheard from a guide who spent four months recovering from a torn meniscus

Land access drift: losing permission or habitat change

The habitat you scouted last August might not exist this year. That's the quiet killer of small game hunting—the slow erosion of access. A logging road gets gated. A farmer sells the parcel to a developer. A wet spring wipes out the grouse brood you counted on. I lost my best quail spot three years ago when the landowner died and the family posted every boundary with No Trespassing signs. No warning. Just gone.

This drift is insidious because it accumulates over seasons. You don't notice the first year when a patch of brush gets cleared. By year three, the covey that held thirty birds now holds six. The solution is boring: maintain relationships with landowners year-round, not just before opening day. Bring firewood in December. Offer to help fix fence lines. The gesture matters more than the work. And always have a backup plan—three spots for every species, because one will disappear without notice. Most teams skip this. Then they wonder why the hunting dries up.

The long-term cost of access drift isn't just lost hunts. It's the time spent re-scouting, the frustration of driving past posted land, the slow realization that your mental map of good country has more holes than solid ground. Start tracking your permission status in a notebook or spreadsheet. Update it every spring. When the inevitable email comes—"Sorry, no hunting this year"—you want three alternatives ready, not a panic call to the only guy who still lets you walk his back forty.

When Not to Use This Approach: Knowing When to Stay Home

Extreme weather and animal stress

Some days the field tells you to sit down. Not because you're tired — because pushing into a hunt during a heatwave or a hard freeze puts the animal at a disadvantage you can’t justify. I've watched hunters drag themselves through 90-degree afternoons, sweating through camo, chasing rabbits that are already panting in shade. That’s not skill. That’s pressure on an animal that can’t thermoregulate fast enough to escape you. When temps spike above 80°F, wounding loss climbs too — blood spoils fast, trailing dogs quit, and a clean hit turns into a lost animal that suffers for hours. The ethical move? Stay home. Check the forecast, not just for rain but for heat advisories or windchills that force wildlife into survival mode. If they’re conserving energy just to breathe, you don’t get to call it fair chase.

Low population periods: late winter and drought

Every hunter knows the difference between seeing sign and seeing game. What’s harder to admit is when sign is all that’s left. Late winter, after a mast failure or a dry summer that collapsed insect hatches, populations bottom out. You might still find tracks — but those are the same three animals running circles. Taking one then isn’t harvesting surplus; it’s pulling a pin from a skeleton crew. Drought hits small game hardest. Rabbits and quail need green cover and standing water; without it, they concentrate around the few wet spots left. That makes them easy targets.

Easy, and wrong. The catch is: concentrated animals look abundant, but they aren't. One afternoon of shooting can wipe 40% of a drought-stressed covey. I’ve seen it happen—land that held a dozen birds in spring held two by fall, and both were the same survivors that watched their mates vanish. The trade-off isn’t worth the freezer space. When water holes shrink and cover thins, you switch to scouting only. Let the populations recover. Next season thanks you.

“I killed my limit—but the covey never came back. Took three years to see a flush there again.”

— conversation with a biologist after a drought season hunt

Ethical considerations: wounding loss and overharvest

Here’s the ugly number nobody tracks well: for every rabbit or squirrel you bag, you might lose one to a gut-shot or a cripple that crawls into a hole. That's a 1:1 waste ratio on bad mornings. Most teams won’t talk about it because it feels like failure, but ignoring it doesn't erase the cost. If you’re missing more than one in five shots, you’re not hunting—you're littering the woods with slow deaths.

What usually breaks first is the shooter’s ego, not the pattern. They take a low-percentage shot at a running bunny through brush because “it was there.” Wrong order. Pass the shot. Wait for a clear window or wait until tomorrow. Overharvest compounds this: you take six squirrels from a woodlot that only held twelve, and suddenly the breeding stock is half what it was. The numbers don't bounce back fast—squirrel litters are small, and rabbit nests get hit by predators when adult density drops. Skip a weekend. Let the population stabilize. That’s not weakness—it’s the difference between a hunter and a consumer.

Field note: small plans crack at handoff.

Field note: small plans crack at handoff.

Open Questions and FAQ: What Still Puzzles Hunters

Lead shot vs. steel: performance and regulation

The debate never really settles—it just shifts. Hunters I know swear lead patterns tighter at range, drops birds clean. Steel, they claim, gives you wounded runners and a heavier pocket. That's true in some guns, false in others. What stings more is regulation. Federal zones now restrict lead on most public wetlands, and state lines create a patchwork that's easy to screw up. You drive two counties over, forget your steel-only stamp, and suddenly you're the guy explaining to a warden why your shells match a banned load. The performance gap shrinks fast when you pattern your actual gun. Most modern steel loads with proper choke tubes match lead within twenty yards—past that, you trade a few pellets for compliance. The real puzzle? No one talks about barrel wear. Steel through an old fixed-choke shotgun can bulge the muzzle over a season. I've seen it happen. That's a repair cost most hunters never budget for.

The honest trade-off: you lose some downrange thump, but you gain access to refuges that stay open during migration. Worth flagging—steel's higher velocity actually reduces lead time on crossing shots, which new shooters find counterintuitive. They aim ahead like they're shooting lead, miss behind, and blame the load. It's not the ammunition; it's the habit.

“I switched to steel three seasons ago. First dove hunt, I missed seven straight. The eighth bird folded—hit so hard I swore the pattern tightened.”

— Midwest waterfowler, after a long afternoon of cursing his choke

Is rabbit hunting actually sustainable on public land?

Depends who you ask—and which public land you mean. Eastern cottontails in heavy brush can bounce back from moderate pressure within six months. But that assumes you're not hammering the same ten-acre patch every weekend with a dog pack and three shooters. The puzzle emerges when local populations collapse silently: no disease, no habitat loss, just consistent pressure from a handful of hunters who treat the land like a grocery aisle. I've watched a prime spot go from seven flushes per walk to one over two seasons. The rabbits didn't disappear—they shifted to adjacent private land. But if that private land is posted no-trespass, you've effectively mined your own access. Sustainable hunting here means rotating units, leaving thickets untouched through late winter, and actually stopping when the flush rate drops. Most hunters don't. They figure one more walk won't hurt. That hurts.

The catch: public land managers rarely track small-game take with any precision. You're operating blind. The ethical baseline is simple—if you start seeing the same rabbit three times in one sit, you're over-pressuring the block. Move a mile over or switch to squirrel for a month.

How to introduce new hunters without scaring off game

This one stumps even experienced mentors. You load a novice into the blind, they shift weight, sneeze, whisper at the wrong moment—game flushed before the safety clicks off. Wrong order. The fix isn't equipment; it's pacing. I've found that taking a new hunter on a low-stakes walk-through first, with no guns, builds the muscle memory for stillness. You teach them to watch the horizon, not talk, and to signal by touch. Then you move to a .22 squirrel hunt where the stakes are lower and the noise penalty is smaller. The real mistake? Starting with waterfowl. That sets everyone up for frustration. Start with small game that holds tight—cottonmouths in cover, rabbits that sit until nearly stepped on. Build confidence, then increase range.

Teams skip this: they want the dramatic retrieve, the trophy photo. But the new hunter who misses their first five shots and never touches a bird is unlikely to come back. You don't need to fill a bag on day one; you need to fill the memory of a quiet morning where they felt part of the woods, not a liability in it. That's the real puzzle—and the only fix I've found is patience, a thermos of coffee, and zero pressure to pull the trigger.

Summary and Next Experiments to Try

Three things to test in the field this season

Stop over-planning. I've watched teams spend two weeks debating which small-game strategy is theoretically optimal—only to freeze when a real bug surfaces. Your first experiment: pick one pattern from section three—the scouting-loop or the trap-lane—and run it raw for five consecutive hunts. No tweaks mid-run. The catch is discomfort; you'll itch to "improve" after hunt two. Don't. Collect data on time-to-kill and false positives instead. Second test—swap your tooling entirely for one week. If you've been grepping logs by hand, try a structured search tool. If you're heavy on automation, go manual. The trade-off hurts: you'll feel slower. That's the point. You need to feel which gear actually carries weight versus what you've been carrying out of habit.

Third experiment—and this one stings—ban all hunts longer than forty minutes for a month. Hard stop. When the clock hits zero, you walk. What usually breaks first is the ego: "but I'm almost there." That's exactly when small-game hunting turns into a time-sink. We fixed this on one team by using a kitchen timer—stupid, physical, beeps loudly—and after three weeks our closure rate jumped because we stopped chasing ghosts. Try it. Your discipline will crack by day four. That's fine. Record what you abandoned and why.

Tracking your success rates to find patterns

Most hunters don't track anything except the final kill. Wrong order. You need a simple log: date, target type, time spent, outcome (found/not found/abandoned), and one gut check—"did I learn something I'll use next week?" That last column is the one nobody writes. I started keeping a physical notebook—cheap, no sync errors—and within a month saw that I was losing Tuesday afternoons to a specific class of intermittent failure. Without the log, I'd have blamed "bad luck." With it, I shifted my Wednesday morning slot to that same bug class and started killing them in under fifteen minutes.

What about false positives? Track those too. If you're flagging six "hot leads" a day but only one pans out, your filter is too wide—or your definition of "small game" is wrong. A colleague once spent a quarter chasing what he called "micro-latency spikes" until his log showed 90% were just garbage collection noise. He'd been hunting shadows. The fix wasn't a better tool; it was a better question. Try this: after ten logged hunts, pause and ask yourself—what pattern am I not seeing because I'm too busy hunting everything that moves?

“I stopped tracking because it felt bureaucratic. Then I lost three weeks to a single bad assumption.”

— senior engineer, post-mortem retrospective, 2023

One gear upgrade that actually changes outcomes

Not a faster CPU. Not a fancier dashboard. The upgrade that shifts your hit rate is a pre-written exit criterion. Before you start any hunt, write down—physically, on a sticky note—what specific evidence would make you stop and declare success, and what would make you walk away empty-handed. That sounds simple. Most teams skip this: they begin hunting with a vague sense of "I'll know it when I see it." They never see it. Or they see everything. The exit criterion forces you to define the shape of your prey before you step into the field. I've seen this single habit cut average hunt time by 40% because people stop chasing signals that almost match. The pitfall: you'll write criteria that are too narrow and miss real kills. That's okay—tune it. A bad criterion beats no criterion, because you can improve a bad one. You can't improve a blank page. Next hunt: write your exit line before you open your tools. Then see if you stick to it. Most people won't. That's your real data point.