You're Not Avoiding It. You're Still Thinking.
- BD3 Solutions
- 7 days ago
- 6 min read
By Andrea Spyros & Nancy DeFina | BD3 Solutions
We want to share something we've never written about before.
When the two of us first started working together on what would become the Untangle Procrastination™ program, we met for one hour a week. We did that for three years—researching, discussing, building, refining. We made real headway. The work felt meaningful and alive every time we sat down together.
Not long ago, we looked back and added up all of those hours. Every session, every meeting, every hour at the table over three years.
It came to less than one month of full-time work.
Less than a month. To build a program we'd been developing for three years.
What we've come to believe is this: the program didn't take less than a month to build. It took three years. It just didn't look like work for most of them.
It looked like living.
We read unrelated things that turned out to be related, had conversations that planted seeds we didn't harvest for months, woke up at 2 a.m. with a connection that hadn't been visible at noon.
The hour a week was where we articulated what was already forming.
The time between was where the forming happened. The time between the work was the work.
What Incubation Actually Is
The concept of incubation has been studied by cognitive scientists and creativity researchers for decades. The basic finding is consistent and somewhat counterintuitive: for complex, creative, or emotionally nuanced problems, stepping away from active thinking often produces better outcomes than continued focused effort.
This happens because the brain doesn't stop working when you stop consciously working. It continues processing in the background, making connections between disparate pieces of information, testing configurations you weren't aware it was testing, and occasionally surfacing a solution that focused attention couldn't find. The classic examples are the scientist who solves the problem in the bath, the writer who finds the structure on a walk, the strategist who wakes up knowing what to do.
This isn't mystical. It's how complex thinking works. And it has real implications for how we interpret the pauses in our work and the guilt we attach to them.
Andrea discovered this firsthand—the hard way. For years, her go-to downtime was watching creative competition shows like Glow Up and Top Chef and old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
For years, she felt quietly guilty about the hours she spent. It felt indulgent. Unproductive. She was almost afraid to mention it out loud, especially after a friend did the math once on how many hours a year she was logging in front of a screen “being unproductive”.
Then one day, mid-shower, it clicked. The ideas that had been eluding her at the desk were showing up effortlessly, and they were showing up because of the screen time, not despite it.
The undemanding, visually engaging, emotionally absorbing quality of those shows wasn't switching her brain off. It was freeing up the part of her brain that does its best work when the conscious, effortful mind finally stops crowding it.
She wasn't wasting time. She was creating the conditions for her best thinking. Once she understood it as part of her process, the guilt dissolved. And the ideas kept coming.
When you're working on something genuinely complex—a creative project, a strategic decision, a piece of writing that needs to find its shape—there will be periods where nothing visible is happening. You're not at the desk, not making progress you can point to, and not producing anything you can show anyone. If you've internalized the idea that productivity means constant forward motion, those periods will feel like failure.
They're not. They're often the most important part.
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The Guilt That Interrupts the Process
Here's where it gets costly. When you misread incubation as procrastination, the natural response is to force action. You push yourself to sit down and produce something before it's ready. You break the project into tiny actions and make yourself do them before the thinking that would make those actions meaningful has actually been completed.
Sometimes this works fine: the forcing function helps, the momentum builds, and something decent comes out. But often, especially for the work that matters most to you, premature action produces something you're disappointed in. The idea that needed more time to develop gets expressed too early, in a form that doesn't do it justice. And then, here's the real cost: you feel worse about the project than you did before you started.
The guilt of not starting gets replaced by the identity of not-good-enough.
We see this pattern constantly with the professionals we work with. The presentation that got rushed and landed flat. The strategy document that was pushed out before the real insight had formed. The creative project that was published, and true to form, your brain handed you a brilliant idea that arrived too late to use.
The irony is that the guilt about "not starting" often produces exactly the outcome it feared: subpar work, low confidence, renewed avoidance. Whereas the patience to wait until the idea was ready would have produced something worth being proud of.
Strategic Patience Is a Skill
We want to be careful here because this reframe can be misused. Not every delay is incubation. Not every pause is strategic. "I'm still thinking about it" can absolutely be a story you tell yourself while avoiding something you're genuinely afraid to start.
So how do you tell the difference?
The most reliable signal we've found is this:
When something is genuinely incubating, there's usually a low-level sense of activity underneath the surface. You find yourself returning to the idea. Making small notes. Noticing things in the world that feel relevant. The project is in the background, not forgotten. It’s just not ready. The not-doing doesn't feel like escape. It feels like waiting for something.
Avoidance feels different. There's a flatness to it, or a flinching quality. You don't return to the idea; you actively redirect away from it. The thought of working on it produces the dread response we talked about in this article. The Procrastination Cycle kicks in. The Distractivities™ appear.
If you notice the latter, the tools we have already shared apply: Tiny Habits®, the Action Test, adding friction, the judgment reframes. But if you notice the former, the right response might simply be to trust it. To give the idea the time it needs. To resist the guilt that says inactivity is the same as laziness.
Strategic patience, i.e., knowing the timing isn't right yet and allowing yourself to wait without shame, is a genuine skill. It requires self-awareness, trust in your own process, and the willingness to tolerate the discomfort of not-yet without collapsing it into a story about not-ever.
It also requires honesty. Because the line between strategic patience and comfortable avoidance can blur, and you are the only one who can really tell the difference.
A Question Worth Sitting With
Think about one thing you've been judging yourself for not doing yet. Something that's been sitting in the back of your mind, half-formed, waiting.
Now ask yourself honestly, with as much self-compassion as you can manage: Is this avoidance, or is this still forming?
If it's avoidance, you know what to do. Make it tiny, lower the bar, ask what's making it hard to start.
If it's still forming, if there's a quiet sense of something developing underneath, if the idea returns to you without prompting, if you're collecting thoughts and impressions even when you're not consciously working, then the most productive thing you might be able to do right now is nothing.
Or more precisely: nothing visible, while trusting that something real is happening anyway.
That's not procrastination. That's how good work gets made.
Next week: It may not actually be the task you’re avoiding. You could be stuck at the decision that comes before it.
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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