Why We Don't Use "Beat," "Crush," or "Destroy" Procrastination. Here's What We Say Instead
- BD3 Solutions
- May 25
- 5 min read
By Andrea Spyros & Nancy DeFina | BD3 Solutions:
Open almost any book, course, app, or article in the procrastination space, and you'll encounter a specific vocabulary.
Beat procrastination. Crush your to-do list. Destroy your bad habits. Dominate your day. Go out there and kill it.
These are words of violence. They're so common in the productivity and self-improvement space that most people don't notice them anymore. They've become wallpaper. But we notice them, because they're built on an assumption we've never agreed with: you are the enemy and the solution is to overpower yourself.
We don't talk that way. We never have. And this issue is about why.
The Word We Chose Instead
When we named our program, we didn't call it "Beat Procrastination." We called it Untangle Procrastination™.
That wasn't an accident or a softening of the message. It was a more accurate description of what actually happens when someone gets unstuck.
A knot isn't something you beat, crush, or destroy. If you grab a tangled ball of string and start pulling hard, you don't get a straight line. You get tighter knots. The threads compress, the pathways close off, and what was hard to undo becomes much harder.
What works is the opposite: a light touch, starting with the threads that are easiest to move, and working gradually toward the knots that are deeper and more stuck. It takes time and patience, but it's the only approach that actually produces a straight line at the end.
This is also, not coincidentally, how behavior change actually works. Dr. BJ Fogg's research at Stanford confirms what we've seen in our work: you change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad. Shame doesn't create sustainable forward motion. It creates avoidance. The harder you push yourself with judgment and self-criticism, the more the Procrastination Cycle tightens. The more you Celebrate even the tiniest step, the more your brain learns to associate the work with feeling good. Ultimately, avoidance lessens, and you get more done.
"Beat/crush/destroy" all assume the problem is you and your lack of force. Untangle implies the problem needs time and patience. We are firmly in the second camp.
What We Actually Believe
We believe procrastination is an emotion management problem, not a time management problem. We believe the Three Hidden Knots: confusing aspiration with action, Distractivities™, and self-judgment, keep people stuck, not because they lack willpower but because the cycle runs on negative emotion, and you can't override negative emotion with more negative emotion.
We believe the word "should" is the most expensive word in the English language, and that the productivity industry has been making money off of people with it for decades.
We believe that Distractivities™ are signals, not failures—that the things you do when you don't want to do the thing you need to do are telling you something worth hearing.
We believe that awareness without judgment is a starting point, not a luxury. That slowing down to understand what's actually happening is more efficient than pushing harder in the wrong direction or pulling harder on your knots.
And we believe, with genuine conviction and decades of behavior science behind us, that Celebration is not the soft part of behavior change. It is the mechanism. Without it, nothing sticks.
What We Don't Believe
We don't believe shame is an engine of change. We've watched too many smart, driven, genuinely capable people run themselves into the ground trying to discipline themselves into behaviors that a different design could have made natural. If shaming yourself into action actually worked, you’d have everything accomplished and wouldn't be reading an article on Untangling Procrastination right now.
We don't believe in the "just do it" advice that reduces a complex emotional experience to a mechanical instruction. "Just do it" ignores the three hidden reasons why starting is hard, and leaves the person who can't just start feeling worse about themselves than before.
We don't believe in accountability systems that run on external pressure and shame, because those have never been reliable for long-term change. What actually sticks is change that's designed well—behaviors matched to what you already want, structured so that doing them doesn't require heroic levels of willpower or motivation.
We don't believe in the hustle culture version of productivity, which promises freedom through relentless optimization and delivers exhaustion instead. We've both lived that version. We know what it costs; it’s far too expensive. It’s not worth it.
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How We've Actually Lived This
Nancy doesn't storm out of things. When something is over, she steps away quietly. There's no drama, no burning of bridges, no announcement—just a clear-eyed recognition that this thing is done, and a move on to the next thing. The transition happens at its own pace.
Andrea doesn't burn bridges either. She grieves them. Even the bridges she built herself, even the ones she chose to dismantle, even the ones that had run their full course and needed to end. The gift shop took six months to close, which she describes as fast, and two years to fully grieve. That grieving was part of the process, not a delay of it.
Neither of us has ever solved a stuck place in our lives by crushing it. We've untangled it.
For the People the Industry Left Behind
Here's the truth about the Productivity Industrial Complex: it was never designed for you. It was designed to make money by selling you an unattainable ideal version of yourself. It’s based on the premise that something is intrinsically wrong with you, that your sole value lies in your ability to produce. It has very little to offer someone who already cares deeply, already tries hard, and is already drowning in self-criticism about not trying hard enough.
That's the person we built Untangle Procrastination™ for.
If the "beat/crush/destroy" vocabulary has never sat right with you—if the whole optimization culture makes you feel vaguely worse instead of better—that instinct is worth trusting. It's not resistance. It's discernment. You've been handed a framework that assumes the problem is YOU, when the problem might actually be something quieter and more specific.
A knot. In a particular place. That needs a particular kind of attention.
That's what we're here to help you find.
P.S. We want our content to be useful to you. So we put together a short survey (<3 minutes). It asks what you do, how procrastination shows up for you, and how you like to consume our content. The more specific and unfiltered you are, the better. We will read every response personally. What you share will directly shape what we write about, build, and offer over the next six months. We really appreciate you taking the time and energy to be with us on this Untangling journey.
Next week: We have something special planned. We hope you’ll play along. Hint: fill out our survey to access the specialness. 😊
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.
Andrea Spyros and Nancy DeFina are the founders of BD3 Solutions and creators of Untangle Procrastination™, a science-based program built on models and methods from the Stanford Behavior Design Lab.
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