What If You're Not Procrastinating At All?
- BD3 Solutions
- Jul 6
- 5 min read
By Andrea Spyros & Nancy DeFina | BD3 Solutions
Let's start with something we really need you to hear:
Sometimes you're not procrastinating.
Sometimes you're not procrastinating.
Sometimes you're not procrastinating.
Oh wait, did we mention: sometimes you're not procrastinating.
And the fact that you think you are, might be making everything worse.
We've spent a lot of time in this space talking about the Procrastination Cycle—how it works, why it's so sticky, and what you can do to interrupt it. All of that still stands. The cycle is real, the Three Hidden Knots are real, and the tools for untangling them work.
But there's a shadow side to procrastination awareness that we want to name directly. When you understand that procrastination is a problem, when you've learned to spot the avoidance, the Distractivities™, and the shame spiral, it's easy to start pathologizing every pause. Every delay becomes evidence of a knot. Every moment of not-doing becomes something to fix.
And that's its own kind of trap.
Here’s what we heard at our Open House: every single person told a different story, and every single person was shaming themselves for something that wasn’t procrastination at all.
Not all delay is avoidance. Not all pauses are procrastination. And treating them as if they are doesn't just fail to help, it actively adds shame to situations that don't deserve it.
The Misdiagnosis Problem
Think about the last time you felt guilty for not doing something. Really sit with it for a moment. You had the task on your list. Days passed. The guilt grew. You told yourself, or someone else told you, that you were procrastinating.
But were you?
Or were you incubating, letting a complex idea develop below the surface before it was ready to be articulated? Or waiting for circumstances to align in a way that would make the action actually effective? Or holding a decision that needed more time to become clear? Or carrying a commitment that had quietly stopped making sense for who you are now?
These aren't the same as procrastination.
Here's the tricky part: they feel the same. From the outside, they look identical. Nothing is getting done, time is passing, the list isn't shrinking. And from the inside, it feels like procrastination too. That nagging sense that you're falling behind, avoiding, failing to do the thing.
But feeling like you're procrastinating isn't the same as procrastinating. The internal experience is the same. The reality underneath it is not. And that means the right response is different, too.
So let yourself off the hook.
When you treat incubation like avoidance, you interrupt a process that was working.
When you treat strategic patience like laziness, you force action at the wrong moment and wonder why the results feel off.
When you treat a values mismatch like a motivation problem, you spend enormous energy trying to get yourself to do something that was never really yours to do.
The diagnosis matters. Because the wrong diagnosis leads to the wrong intervention and usually to more shame, more pressure, and more of the cycle you were trying to escape.
The “Should” Is the Clue
Here's a useful distinction we've developed through years of working with professionals on this:
Procrastination almost always involves something you genuinely want to do, or know you need to do, and are avoiding because of uncomfortable emotions. The “should” emotion (guilt, shame, blame) is real, and it's pointing at something real. There's a task, a fear, a knot. Something is tangled. Remember Hidden kNOT #3: when you hear the word “should” in your head, it’s your signal to stop and ask questions.
Not every "should" is procrastination.
Here's how to tell the difference:
Ask yourself a version of the question we use to untangle Hidden Knot #1: Is there an action beneath this "should"? Something specific you could do right now, in this moment, but are avoiding? If yes, that's procrastination. There's a real task underneath, and the guilt is pointing straight at it.
Sometimes you go looking for the action, and you can't find one. There's no clear task. No next step. Just a vague, lingering "I don't know" or a sense that you should be doing something, without anything specific to actually do. That's your signal that this might not be procrastination at all.
In fact, it is related to Hidden Knot #1: it's kNOT an action. When there's no action beneath the "should," there's nothing to procrastinate on. What you're feeling isn't avoidance. It's something else asking for your attention.
Because when you examine what's underneath these "shoulds," you don't find avoidance. You find clarity that hasn't been honored yet. A need that hasn't been named. A decision that's still forming. A commitment that's ready to end. It's nuanced, and the more you pay attention to your "should" emotions, the easier it becomes to recognize the difference.
The “should” emotion, in these cases, isn't a signal that you're failing to do something. It's a signal that your understanding of the situation needs updating.
That's a meaningful distinction. And it opens up a completely different set of questions.
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A Different Set of Questions
When something has been sitting on your list (or your heart) long enough to carry real emotional weight, it's worth pausing before you reach for the productivity tools. Before you break it into tiny actions and set up a Tiny Habit® Recipe and add friction to your Distractivities, ask a few questions:
Do I actually want to do this, or did I want to do it once, and that's no longer true?
Do I actually want to do this, or did I say, “yes” when I really wanted to say, “no”?
Is this something I'm avoiding, or something I'm genuinely not ready for yet?
What would it mean to take this off the list entirely? Relief? Regret?
Is this task waiting for me to act, or is it waiting for something outside of me to shift first?
Am I the right person to do this at all?
These aren't escape hatches. You'll know the difference between using them to genuinely examine a situation and using them to avoid something hard, because the first produces clarity, and the second just moves the guilt somewhere quieter.
But for the things that have been quietly weighing on you without any real forward motion, these questions often reveal something important: that the problem isn't your follow-through. It's your framing.
What's Coming Next
Over the next few weeks, we're going to look at four specific situations where what looks like procrastination is actually something else.
We'll talk about the “overcrowded wall,” the thing you can't start because you've never taken the old things down.
We'll talk about the difference between avoidance and incubation, and why the guilt you feel about "not starting yet" is sometimes working against a process that's already underway.
And we'll talk about analysis paralysis, the cousin of procrastination that looks identical from the outside but has a completely different cause and a completely different solution.
In each case, the goal is the same: to help you see your situation more clearly, carry less unearned shame, make better decisions about what actually needs your energy, and decide where you want to focus your time and talents.
Because sometimes the most productive thing you can do is stop treating a pause like a problem.
Next week: what museum curation taught Nancy about the real reason you can't start the new thing.
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.
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