Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
What These Words Mean
You know that stale, slightly heavy feeling when the day is almost over and you can still name the one thing you meant to start. It is not dramatic. It is quieter than that. It is a small drift, a slow slide, and then suddenly your mind is busy explaining why tomorrow will be better.
Start with “Procrastination.” On the surface, it is the habit of delaying what you intend to do. It names the choice to do something else first, even when you know what matters. Underneath, it points to a very human tenderness around effort: you put distance between yourself and a task because starting would make it real, and real things can judge you back.
Then comes “is the art.” In everyday words, art is skillful, practiced, even a little admired. Calling procrastination an art gives it a strange polish, as if delay can be done with style. The deeper sting is that you can get good at it. You can make postponing look reasonable, even responsible, and you can refine your excuses until they feel like taste.
Next is “of keeping up.” That phrase sounds energetic, like matching a pace, staying current, not falling behind. But it is a sideways kind of motion. You are busy, yes, yet the busyness is spent on maintenance rather than creation. You become someone who is always catching up, always chasing, and never quite arriving at the moment where you choose what happens next.
Finally, there is “with yesterday.” It is such a small word, and it carries the weight. Yesterday is what already happened, what you did not finish, what you avoided, what you promised yourself you would handle. When you keep up with yesterday, today turns into a repair shop. You’re not moving forward; you’re paying off old emotional debt, answering the same inner complaint again and again.
The quote pivots by using “is” to turn procrastination into “the art of keeping up with yesterday,” not the act of resting, but a practiced way of living behind your own life.
Picture a plain, familiar moment: you sit at the kitchen table with your laptop open, the screen throwing a soft bluish light across your hands, and you tell yourself you’ll just clear a few emails first. An hour later you’re still organizing, still tidying, still preparing to begin. It feels like progress because you’re doing things. Yet what you’re really doing is making yesterday look less messy so you do not have to face the clean, undecorated demand of today.
I think the phrase “keeping up” is the sharpest part, because it admits how exhausting avoidance can be.
There is also a quieter truth here about identity. When you repeatedly chase yesterday, you start to think of yourself as perpetually behind. You expect the day to enter already late, and you meet your own goals with a pre-apology. Procrastination stops being a choice you make and becomes a story you live inside.
Still, these words do not fully hold when delay is actually your mind trying to find the right shape for something. Sometimes the pause is where honesty gathers, and rushing would only produce noise.
Even then, the quote asks a useful question: are you pausing to listen, or are you practicing the art of staying safely in the past? Yesterday is comfortable because you already know how it ends. Today demands that you write a new sentence, and that is exactly why it matters.
Behind These Words
Don Marquis is widely credited with this saying, and it fits the kind of wry, observant humor people associate with writers who pay close attention to everyday self-deception. The quote has traveled the way many crisp remarks do: repeated in conversations, pinned to posters, shared as a small jab of recognition. Because it is short and neatly turned, it is sometimes passed along without much source detail attached, which can make attribution feel a bit loose in popular culture.
What makes these words feel at home in a modern setting is the same thing that likely made them feel true in Marquis’s world: people have always had more intentions than follow-through. When life is full of obligations, it is easy to mistake motion for progress. The language here captures that timeless trap by using such an ordinary time marker, “yesterday,” and turning it into a place you can get stuck.
The environment that produces a quote like this is not just one era’s schedule. It is any moment where being “busy” becomes a badge, and where constant catching up feels normal. In that kind of atmosphere, procrastination is not lazy emptiness. It is energetic avoidance. That is why the phrase lands with both humor and discomfort.
About Don Marquis
Don Marquis, a writer and humorist, is often remembered for a style that mixes wit with a clear-eyed view of human habits. His observations tend to work because they do not shout; they nudge. They catch you in the act of justifying yourself, then offer a phrase you cannot quite unsee.
He is associated with a kind of comedy that is not only about being funny, but about being accurate. Instead of treating human flaws as rare exceptions, his tone suggests they are common, almost predictable, and therefore worth examining without panic. That sensibility matches the quote’s choice of words: procrastination is not described as a disaster, but as an “art,” something you can practice until it feels like part of your personality.
What keeps his viewpoint useful is the blend of warmth and bite. You are not called a failure here. You’re shown a pattern: if you keep putting things off, you do not get freedom, you get a life spent managing leftovers. Seen that way, the quote is less like a scolding and more like a mirror held at a gentle angle, inviting you to step out of yesterday and into the harder, cleaner truth of now.