The Stuff You're Not Procrastinating On Might Be the Problem
- BD3 Solutions
- Jul 13
- 5 min read
By Andrea Spyros & Nancy DeFina | BD3 Solutions
We've spent the past few weeks talking about the things you can't seem to start—the tasks that sit on your list, untouched, gathering emotional weight while you check the news or reorganize the pantry.
But today we want to talk about the opposite problem.
What about the things you won't stop doing?
The Overcrowded Wall
One of us (Nancy), has degrees in art and is a trained museum curator. She's worked at the Guggenheim and the Whitney in NYC, and just last year she designed an entire history exhibition for the Chi Omega National Headquarters. She chose every piece, decided how each element would be arranged and displayed, and shaped the experience a visitor would have walking through the gallery.
Here's something she learned that most people get wrong about curating: the hardest part of the job is never what goes up. There are so many options for what could be on the wall. The most important part (and the thing that defines a great curator) is knowing what needs to be left out.
A wall can only hold so much. Put too many pieces on it, even extraordinary ones, and the viewer stops seeing any of them. The room gets noisy. Nothing has space to breathe. A person walking through will notice, without being able to name it, that something is off. They feel overwhelmed instead of moved.
A great exhibit doesn't just show you the best work. It shows you the right work, in the right order, with enough space between pieces that each one actually lands.
And getting there almost always means removing something you love.
The To-Do List No One Talks About
We think most people's lives are an overcrowded wall.
They're overcrowded because they care about a lot of things and have said yes to most of them. The volunteer board they joined three years ago. The side hustle they started when it felt exciting. The weekly commitment that used to light them up, but now just takes up a Saturday afternoon. The professional development plan they built for a version of themselves that doesn't quite exist anymore.
None of these things are bad. Most of them were great decisions when they were made. But they're all still on the wall, and every one of them is taking up space, attention, and energy that could go to the thing you keep saying you can't find time to start.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: sometimes the reason you can't start the new thing isn't that you're procrastinating. It's that you've never taken the old things down.
Your to-do list isn't just a list of things you need to do. It's also a museum of things you once committed to. And the exhibit hasn't been updated in years.
Why Taking Things Down Is So Hard
If it were just a matter of efficiency, this would be easy. You'd audit your calendar, drop the things that don't serve you anymore, and free up the space. People write whole books about that. You've probably read a few.
But it doesn't work that way, and the reason it doesn't work is the same reason Knot #3 is so sticky: taking something off your wall isn't just a logistical decision. It's an identity decision.
When you quit the volunteer board, you're not just freeing up a Tuesday evening. You're saying, I'm no longer the kind of person who does this. When you let the side hustle go, you're grieving the version of yourself who started it. When you finally tell someone that you're done with the thing you've been doing together for years, you're changing the story, not just your schedule.
Nancy knows this from both sides. She left a museum career in New York to move across the country for love, and spent years building a life in California that looked nothing like the path she'd trained for. She ran a dance school for pre-schoolers, designed furniture displays at IKEA, and took a sales job to pay the bills.
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What she was actually doing, in every one of those transitions, was the same thing she'd learned in the gallery: standing in front of a wall, seeing clearly what was there, and making the quiet decision about what no longer belonged—even when the piece was beautiful, even when she'd fought to get it, even when taking it down meant that space would feel empty for a while.
That skill, the willingness to take something down without knowing yet what will replace it, is one of the bravest things a person can do. And it's also one of the most common things that factors into procrastination without people realizing it.
The Procrastination You Can't See
Here's why this matters for you: when people come to us saying they can't start something, we often find that the real problem isn't the new thing at all. It's that the old things are taking up so much room that there's nowhere for the new thing to go.
You're not procrastinating on writing the book. You're procrastinating on admitting that the committee work you've been doing for four years has run its course, and you need that energy back.
You're not procrastinating on the career change. You're procrastinating on the conversation with your partner about what your life would look like if you actually went for it. And what that transition may mean for both of you financially.
You're not procrastinating on getting healthy. You're procrastinating on releasing the social commitments that drain you every weekend and leave you too exhausted and bloated to move on Monday.
The thing you can't start is often downstream of the thing you won't stop.
Stop Collecting, Start Curating
There's a difference between someone who collects things they like and someone who curates a space they love, and learning to tell them apart is where this work begins.
We're not going to give you a five-step framework here. Curation doesn't work that way. It's an art, not a to-do list.
Here are a few questions we've found helpful when a wall gets overcrowded.
"If I were building this exhibit from scratch today, would I choose this piece?"
Not "does this still matter to me." Almost everything still matters on some level. The question is whether you'd actively choose it again, knowing what you know now, and given the space you have. If the answer is no, that's information worth sitting with.
"What would have more room to breathe if this came down?"
Sometimes the value of removing something only becomes visible when you imagine the space it would leave behind. The goal isn't an empty wall; it's a wall where every piece has enough room to be seen.
"Am I keeping this up because I want it there, or because I'm afraid of what the room would look like without it?"
That's the curator's version of Knot #3. Sometimes the thing on the wall isn't serving the exhibit anymore. It's serving your identity. And that's a harder, slower kind of untangling.
A Simple Place to Start
This week, we'd love for you to try something Nancy does instinctively: walk through your own exhibit.
Look at your calendar, your commitments, your ongoing projects, not with the goal of optimizing them, but with a curator's eye. Ask yourself which pieces are still earning their place on the wall, and which ones you've been keeping up out of habit, obligation, or the quiet fear of what it would mean to take them down.
You don't have to remove anything yet. A good curator spends a long time looking before touching anything.
But naming the pieces that no longer belong—that's where the space comes from. And space is what you need before anything new can go up.
Andrea Spyros and Nancy DeFina are the founders of BD3 Solutions and creators of Untangle Procrastination™, a science-based program built on the models and methods from the Stanford Behavior Design Lab.
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