You Can't Procrastinate on an Aspiration (or How to Stop Procrastinating on Your Goals)

BD3 Solutions
Apr 6
4 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

By BD3 Solutions: Andrea Spyros & Nancy DeFina

Here's a question worth sitting with: What's actually on your to-do list right now?

Not your calendar. Not your project management app. The real list—the one in the back of your mind, the one that follows you into the weekend and shows up uninvited on Sunday evenings. The list of things you know you should be doing but somehow never quite get to.

If you look closely, we'd bet a lot of what's on that list isn't actually a task. It's a wish.

The Hidden Reason Your To-Do List Isn't Working

"Get fit." "Sort out my finances." "Work on my career." "Finally get organized."

These feel like things to do. They carry the weight of real intentions: you mean them, you care about them, you genuinely want them done. But they're not actions. They're aspirations. And that difference is costing you more than you realize.

Here's the key insight: you cannot procrastinate on an aspiration. You can only procrastinate on an action—something specific and doable, something you could actually start right now.

When your brain looks at "get fit" and tries to figure out what to do next, it finds nothing to grab onto. No clear starting point. No obvious first step. So it stalls. And when you stall repeatedly on the same item, you start to feel bad about yourself. The task gets heavier. The avoidance deepens. What started as a vague aspiration becomes a source of real shame.

This is what we call Hidden Knot #1—one of three specific tangles that keep people locked in the Procrastination Cycle. And it's hiding in plain sight on almost every to-do list we've ever seen.

The Action Test

The way out is simple, though it takes a little practice. We call it the Action Test, and it's just one question:

"Can I do ____ right now, in this moment?"

Run anything you've been avoiding through that filter:

"Get fit" → NO. You can't get fit right now. That's an aspiration.
"Put on my walking shoes" → YES. You can do that right now. That's an action.
"Save for retirement" → NO. Aspiration.
"Email HR about enrolling in the 401K" → YES. Action.
“Deal with the clutter in my office" → NO. Aspiration.
“Put away one item on my desk” → YES. Action.

The items pass the Action Test because they're specific, concrete, and doable at a particular moment in time. They give your brain something to actually do—which means they give you somewhere to actually start.

Now Make It Tiny

Turning an aspiration into an action is the first move. The second—and this is where the real magic happens—is making that action incredibly easy to do. Not just small, ridiculously tiny. And more importantly, ridiculously easy. So easy it almost feels silly. So tiny that saying "I don't have time for that" genuinely doesn't hold up.

“Draft the report introduction" becomes "Open the document.”

“Reach out to contacts” becomes “Send one LinkedIn message.”

“Read before bed” becomes “Open the book and read one sentence.”

“Update my website” becomes “Change the headline on the homepage.”

“Clear my inbox” becomes “Reply to one email.”

This isn't a trick or a hack. It's grounded in how behavior actually works. Dr. BJ Fogg, founder of the Stanford Behavior Design Lab, has spent twenty years researching habit formation, and one of his core findings is this: motivation is unreliable. It comes and goes. Willpower depletes. But a behavior that's tiny enough doesn't need motivation. It just needs a moment.

When you make the first step tiny (and easy), you remove the emotional friction that triggers avoidance. And once you've started—once your shoes are on, the document is open, the email is drafted—the psychological barrier to continuing drops dramatically.

What Happens Next: The Ripple Effect

Here's what we see happen again and again in our workshops. Someone takes one tiny action—not because they felt motivated, but because the action was small and easy enough not to trigger their avoidance response. And then something unexpected happens: they keep going.

The shoes go on. Then they're outside. Then they're halfway down the block. They finish their 3-mile walk.

We worked with someone—let's call him Mike—who'd been telling himself to "get fit" for two years. Every day he felt frustrated that nothing had changed. Every day the aspiration sat there, heavy and unmoving. Once he realized "getting fit" wasn't an action, he made a list of things he actually could do: drink a glass of water, do ten pushups, go for a walk. He picked one. He made it tiny: after closing his laptop at the end of the workday, he'd put on his walking shoes. That was it. No commitment to walk. Just shoes.

Most days, he walked. Some days he didn't—but he still put on the shoes, celebrated that small win, and kept the habit alive. Over time, the walking led to drinking more water, which led to eating better, which led to… actually getting fit.

One real aspiration. One tiny action. Major ripple effects that surprised him.

Your Turn

Take one thing you've been putting off. Something that's been quietly following you around. Run it through the Action Test.

If it passes, great. Now make it tiny.

If it doesn't pass, that's useful information, not a failure. It just means you've been carrying an aspiration and calling it a task. Break it down. Find the first concrete, doable step. Make that step tiny. Then do it.

Then celebrate. A fist pump, a quiet "yes," a smile—whatever feels right. It sounds small because it is small. That's the whole point.

The knot you've been pulling at? It just got a little looser.

Next week we're talking about Distractivities™—the things you do when you don't want to do the things you need to do. You definitely have a few. So do we.

Andrea Spyros and Nancy DeFina are the founders of BD3 Solutions and creators of Untangle Procrastination™, a science-based program built on methods from the Stanford Behavior Design Lab.

Ready to see the full Procrastination Cycle mapped out in one visual—with exactly where to intervene? Download the free guide here.→ BD3Solutions.com/ProcrastinationCycle

Tiny Habits® is a registered trademark of BJ Fogg, PhD