What Your Distractivities™ Are Actually Telling You

Let's start with a confession. While writing this post, one of us checked email twice, made a cup of tea she didn't finish, and spent four minutes reading reviews for a product she has no intention of buying.

This is not unusual. This is Tuesday.

We all have them—the go-to escape routes we take when a task starts to feel uncomfortable. The behaviors that fill the space between intention and action. We call them Distractivities™, and they are both completely human and quietly devastating to your productivity.

Understanding them—really understanding them, not just feeling guilty about them—is the key to taking back control.

What a Distractivity Actually Is

A Distractivity is anything you do when you don't want to do the thing you need to do.

The list looks different for everyone, but some classics include: Checking email or the news. Scrolling social media. Reorganizing something that didn't need reorganizing. Going to the kitchen—not because you're hungry, but because the kitchen is not your desk. Doing "research" that's really just delaying. Cleaning. Online shopping. Watching one more video.

What all of these have in common is that they offer immediate relief from the emotional discomfort of a task you're avoiding. And that relief is real—we want to be clear about that. Distractivities work. They make you feel better, at least for a moment. That's exactly why your brain keeps reaching for them.

The problem isn't the relief. The problem is where you end up when it wears off: back at the same task, now slightly more behind, with a new layer of guilt on top.

The Signal You're Missing

Here's the reframe that changes everything: Distractivities aren't a character flaw. They're information.

Every time you find yourself reaching for your phone instead of your work, your brain is telling you something. Usually it's one of a few things: this task feels too big and I don't know where to start. This task feels uncomfortable and I'm not sure I can do it well. I'm tired and my focus is depleted. Something about this task is triggering real anxiety and I need relief.

None of those are laziness. All of them are worth knowing.

When you can identify what's actually driving the Distractivity, you can respond to the real problem instead of just wrestling with the symptom. Is the task too vague? Break it into an action. Is it triggering self-doubt? That's a judgment—and we'll get to that next week. Are you just running low on energy? That's a different problem entirely, with a different solution.

Awareness is always the first untangle. You can't address what you haven't named.

Two Ways to Work With Your Distractivities

Once you know your Distractivities, you have two practical tools for working with them rather than just surrendering to them.

1. Add a Little Friction

The goal here isn't to eliminate your escape routes. It's to make them just slightly harder to access—enough to create a moment of pause between the impulse and the action.

Log out of social media apps instead of just closing the tab. Put tempting snacks in a cupboard or the freezer rather than on the counter. Move your most-used distraction apps to a folder on the last screen of your phone. Turn off non-essential notifications so your attention isn't being tugged away constantly.

None of these are dramatic changes. But a few extra seconds—the time it takes to log back in, to navigate to a buried folder—is often enough for your brain to catch up with your intentions. In that small window, you get to make a conscious choice instead of an automatic one. When you make the distraction slightly less easy, the task becomes the more accessible option—and sometimes that's all the opening you need.

2. Use the Distractivity as a Prompt

This is our favorite tool, and the one that tends to create the most lasting change.

Instead of fighting your Distractivities, build a Tiny Habit® Recipe around them. Use the moment you notice yourself in a Distractivity as your anchor moment—the prompt for a new, tiny behavior.

It looks like this:

After I open the fridge looking for a treat, I will ask myself: "What am I actually procrastinating on right now?"

After I reach for my phone without meaning to, I will take one breath and ask: "What's the next tiny thing I could do?"

The question doesn't commit you to anything. It doesn't demand that you immediately get back to work. It just creates a moment of awareness, a small gap between the impulse and the action, where you can get curious instead of reactive.

And curiosity is a much better starting point than guilt.

The Deeper Move: Compassion, Not Judgment

Here's something we see constantly in our workshops: people know their Distractivities, and they feel terrible about them. They've made their avoidance behaviors into evidence of something wrong with them. Proof that they're undisciplined, unfocused, not capable of the work they want to do.

This is the opposite of helpful. Shame doesn't motivate, it paralyzes. And piling judgment on top of avoidance just adds another sticking point to the Procrastination Cycle.

The more useful stance is simple curiosity. Oh, interesting—I'm in the kitchen again. What's going on? No drama. No self-attack. Just a quiet, genuine question. And underneath that curiosity is something even more powerful: self-compassion. Not the superficial, greeting-card version. The real kind. The kind that acknowledges that avoiding hard things is deeply human, that your brain is doing exactly what brains do, and that you are not broken for struggling with this. Treating yourself with the same basic kindness you'd offer a friend who was stuck? That's not letting yourself off the hook. It's actually what makes change possible.

When you can look at your Distractivities with that kind of distance, you start to notice patterns. You start to see which tasks trigger which escapes, and at what point in the work the avoidance tends to kick in. That information is genuinely useful. It tells you where the real knots are—and those are the ones worth untangling.

(The relationship between self-compassion and procrastination goes deep. We'll be doing a full dive into that soon. Stay tuned.)

This Week

Take five minutes and write down your top three Distractivities. Not to judge them—to know them.

Then pick one. Design a Tiny Habit around it: After I [Distractivity], I will ask myself [question]. Keep the question simple. Keep the commitment small.

Then notice what happens. Not with judgment—with curiosity.

That's how this knot starts to loosen.

Next week: the most powerful hidden knot of all—the judgments we make about ourselves when we know we're procrastinating, and exactly how to untangle them.

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

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