Art & Creativity Quote by Don Marquis

Procrastination, in Don Marquis's hands, isn’t a cute bad habit; it’s a darkly efficient lifestyle. Calling it an "art" flatters the procrastinator with craftsmanship and taste, then immediately exposes the con: the work of delay is meticulous, even disciplined, but its only product is a permanently recycled past. "Keeping up with yesterday" twists the modern virtue of staying current into a joke about being chronically behind. You’re not failing to do things; you’re succeeding at maintaining backlog.

The line works because it compresses self-deception into a tidy paradox. Procrastination often feels like time management: making lists, rearranging priorities, doing "quick" tasks that never quite touch the real one. Marquis punctures that illusion by suggesting the schedule you’re honoring isn’t today’s at all. Yesterday becomes a demanding boss, and the procrastinator becomes an employee who never clocks out.

Context matters: Marquis wrote in the early 20th century, when American life was being reorganized around efficiency, deadlines, and the emerging gospel of productivity. As a journalist, he lived by the clock and watched the culture fetishize the new machinery of timekeeping. His joke lands as quiet resistance to that regime and an indictment of it: the more society insists on relentless forward motion, the more seductive it becomes to hide in "yesterday", where expectations are known and failure has already happened.

It’s wit with a sting. The punchline isn’t that you’re lazy; it’s that you’re busy in exactly the wrong direction.