The final draft of the latest video coding standard, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), was approved in January 2013. The coding efficiency of HEVC surpasses its predecessor, H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), by using only half of the bitrate to encode the same sequence with similar quality. However, the complexity of HEVC is sharply increased compared to H.264/AVC. In this paper, a method is proposed to decrease the complexity of intra coding in HEVC. Early pruning and an early splitting strategy are applied to the quadtree structure of coding tree units (CTU) and residual quadtree (RQT). According to our experiment, when our method is applied to sequences from Class A to Class E, the coding time is decreased by 44% at the cost of a 1.08% Bjontegaard delta rate (BD-rate) increase on average.