Most popular procrastination quotes are misattributed — the name people credit isn’t who said it, or when. “Procrastination is the thief of time” is Edward Young (1742), not Charles Dickens, who only borrowed it in 1850. “Never put off till tomorrow” traces to Lord Chesterfield (1749); Mark Twain’s version was a joke, not advice.
Key takeaways
- “Procrastination is the thief of time” was coined by Edward Young in Night-Thoughts (1742) – a century before Dickens put it in Mr. Micawber’s mouth (1850) and became the name most people credit.
- Lord Chesterfield popularized “never put off till tomorrow what you can do today” in a letter dated 26 December 1749, decades before anyone linked it to Benjamin Franklin.
- Mark Twain’s inverted line – “never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow” – was a satirical joke signed “B.F.” in The Galaxy in 1870, not sincere advice.
- Piers Steel’s 2007 meta-analysis of 691 correlations (Psychological Bulletin) found procrastination affects roughly one-fifth of adults and about half of students.
- Timothy Pychyl of Carleton University summarizes his research with Fuschia Sirois as “procrastination is an emotion-regulation problem, not a time management problem” – a tested reframe, not a folk saying.
What counts as a real procrastination quote?
A real procrastination quote is a traceable line – a named author, a dated source, a passage anyone can go and read. Most of what circulates falls into three buckets: centuries-old proverbs (Young, Chesterfield), tested lines from working researchers (Steel, Pychyl), and unsourced paraphrases that drift further from the original with every reshare. The first two are worth quoting; the third is worth flagging first.
The old proverbs describe how delay feels – time slipping away, a debt coming due. The research lines describe what delay actually is, which is why they read less quotable and more clinical. Neither should borrow the other’s authority. For the tested, practical version, see how to overcome procrastination.
Why do procrastination quotes get misattributed so often?
Because a good line looks for the biggest available name once its original author is forgotten. Quote researcher Nigel Rees named this pattern Churchillian Drift – “the actual originator of a quotation is often elbowed to one side and replaced by someone more famous.” Yale librarian Fred Shapiro separately calls Mark Twain the biggest “quote magnet” in American letters. Procrastination quotes drift the same way.
The three most common misattribution patterns
- The popularizer gets credited as the originator. Dickens didn’t coin the “thief of time” line; Micawber quotes one already a century old.
- The straight proverb gets pinned to the wrong name. Chesterfield repeated it across three letters; Franklin never wrote it.
- Satire gets read as sincere advice. Twain’s joke was signed with fake initials as a parody – readers who miss that quote it straight.
Why the wrong attribution matters
A misattributed quote usually drags a misattributed idea behind it. Crediting Twain with sincere advice turns a joke about the opposite of urgency into a productivity slogan. Flattening Pychyl and Sirois’s emotion-regulation research into an unsourced “someone once said” line makes a tested 2016 finding sound as provisional as a 280-year-old proverb.
To be fair to the proverbs: getting the source wrong doesn’t make Chesterfield’s advice bad advice – it’s reasonable whether or not Franklin said it. The problem is accuracy, not motivational value, and that standard should apply to quotes as much as to statistics.
Which procrastination quotes are backed by real research?
Three of these four are proverbs with no clinical claim behind them; only Pychyl and Sirois’s line is a tested finding. Who said each one, who usually gets the credit instead, and what it’s evidence for:
| Quote | Real source & date | Commonly misattributed to | What it actually tells you |
|---|---|---|---|
| “Procrastination is the thief of time” | Edward Young, Night-Thoughts, Night I (1742) | Charles Dickens | A proverb about compounding delay – not a research finding |
| “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today” | Lord Chesterfield, letter to his son (26 Dec 1749) | Benjamin Franklin | A maxim Chesterfield repeated at least three times; still just a maxim |
| “…what you can do the day after tomorrow” | Mark Twain, “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” The Galaxy (July 1870) | A sincere Franklin or Twain quote | A satirical inversion signed “B.F.” as a joke – not advice |
| “Procrastination is an emotion-regulation problem, not a time management problem” | Timothy Pychyl, Carleton University, with Fuschia Sirois (2016) | Often shared with no attribution | A tested finding from the mood-repair theory of procrastination |
Common mistakes people make with procrastination quotes
Most misuse comes from treating a memorable line as proof, rather than as decoration for proof found elsewhere.
- Crediting the popularizer instead of the source. Dickens gets the credit Edward Young earned in 1742 – check the date before the name.
- Reading 18th- and 19th-century satire as literal advice. Twain’s “B.F.” joke reads sincere if you don’t know it was signed with fake initials on purpose.
- Treating a proverb as clinical evidence. For tested evidence, start with Steel’s meta-analysis or how to overcome procrastination, not a 280-year-old line.
- Treating repetition as proof. The more a quote circulates uncredited, the harder it is to trace – not the truer it becomes.
- Pairing a proverb where a system is needed. A maxim about willpower doesn’t replace Getting Things Done or the two-minute rule.
- Using a misattributed quote to sell a system. “Franklin said never delay, so buy this planner” is marketing in a costume – see the shiny object tax.
What research says about why procrastination happens
Procrastination is a self-regulation failure, not a scheduling problem. Piers Steel’s 2007 meta-analysis (691 correlations, Psychological Bulletin) defined it as voluntarily delaying an action despite expecting to be worse off, and found it affects roughly a fifth of adults and half of students. Task aversiveness, low self-efficacy, and impulsiveness were the strongest predictors – not laziness, and not a fixed trait.
Pychyl and Sirois’s later work adds the mechanism most quotes skip: procrastination is a short-term mood-repair strategy. Avoiding a task that triggers boredom or anxiety brings immediate relief, which is what makes the delay so hard to resist even though the task never gets smaller. Steel himself cautions against treating procrastination as one unified trait with one fix.
Frequently asked questions
Who really said “procrastination is the thief of time”?
English poet Edward Young wrote the line in his 1742 poem Night-Thoughts, a century before it became widely quoted online. It appears near the end of the poem’s first section, in a passage warning that delay steals years “till all are fled” and leaves “the vast concerns of an eternal scene” to a final moment. The poem was hugely popular in its day, but the line long outlived its own source.
Did Charles Dickens write “procrastination is the thief of time”?
No. Dickens put the line in the mouth of his character Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield (1850), which is why he often gets the credit. Micawber says, “My advice is, never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time. Collar him!” He was quoting a proverb already 108 years old at the time, not coining a new one.
Is “never put off till tomorrow what you can do today” a Benjamin Franklin quote?
No. The straight version of this maxim was popularized by Lord Chesterfield in letters to his son, including one dated 26 December 1749 that reads, “No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day.” Franklin is a frequent target of misattribution for sayings he never wrote, and this proverb is one of the most common examples.
Was Mark Twain’s procrastination quote a joke?
Yes. In a satirical 1870 essay for The Galaxy called “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” Twain wrote “never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow just as well” and signed it “B.F.” It parodies Franklin’s real thrift-and-diligence maxims, deliberately reversed for the joke. Later reprints smoothed the grammar into “may be done,” which is how today’s popular wording spread.
What is the most research-backed procrastination quote?
Timothy Pychyl’s line that procrastination is “an emotion-regulation problem, not a time management problem” is the most directly tested of the commonly shared quotes. It comes from his and Fuschia Sirois’s mood-repair theory, developed at Carleton University and detailed in their 2016 book Procrastination, Health, and Well-Being. It reads less catchy than Young’s or Chesterfield’s proverbs, which is exactly why it’s worth quoting correctly.
Why do procrastination quotes matter if the advice is still good?
Because accuracy and usefulness are separate questions, and a site that cites its numbers should cite its quotes the same way. A wrongly credited line doesn’t make Chesterfield’s or Young’s advice worse – it just means the name attached to it is fiction, not the guidance itself. That distinction matters if you’re citing the line yourself, teaching it, or trying to tell a centuries-old proverb apart from a tested research finding.
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How this article was researched
Every quote origin traces to Quote Investigator, Interesting Literature, or a primary text (Young’s Night-Thoughts, Chesterfield’s letters, Twain’s 1870 Galaxy essay). Procrastination science traces to Steel (2007) and Sirois & Pychyl (2016). The viral claim that Twain sincerely endorsed “day after tomorrow” procrastination is not supported by the primary source and was corrected in the body.
Limits: Not medical advice. Quote-history claims rely on the archival work of Quote Investigator and literary historians rather than original primary-source verification by this site; where a claim could not be traced to a dated original, it was left out.
Primary sources and documented quote-history research preferred over repetition count. Read our full methodology.
Sources
- Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65-94. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65
- Sirois, F. M., & Pychyl, T. A. (Eds.). (2016). Procrastination, Health, and Well-Being. Academic Press. Quote confirmed via Carleton University news profile of Timothy Pychyl
- Rees, N., cited in Quote Investigator (2019). Phrase origin: Churchillian Drift. quoteinvestigator.com
- Quote Investigator (2013). Quote origin: Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow just as well. quoteinvestigator.com
- Tearle, O. (2021). The meaning and origin of ‘procrastination is the thief of time.’ Interesting Literature. interestingliterature.com
- Stanhope, P. D., Earl of Chesterfield. Letter to his son (26 December 1749). Quoted in WIST Quotations