What the Stoics said about procrastination

The English word even appears in the classic translation. In George Long’s 1877 Enchiridion, Epictetus warns a student against “procrastination after procrastination” (Enchiridion 51). Marcus Aurelius and Seneca wrote about delay with the same urgency, Marcus mostly about his own.

These are the main passages, quoted below from public-domain translations, with what each says about putting things off:

Epictetus: how long will you defer?

Epictetus taught philosophy at Nicopolis, in northwestern Greece, and his student Arrian compiled the Enchiridion, or Handbook, from his teaching. Chapter 51, near the end of the book, is addressed to someone who has been taught the principles and still hasn’t started.

The student isn’t short of information; Epictetus takes for granted that he knows the principles. What he lacks is a start. His modern counterparts have reasons of their own: one more book on the subject, a quieter month, the start of the quarter. Epictetus’s reply to all of them is a plain fact about age: “You are no longer a youth, but already a full-grown man.” The correction he keeps postponing is his own job.

His sharpest point is about dates. Someone who keeps “fixing day after day, after which you will attend to yourself” doesn’t notice that nothing is changing: “you will not know that you are not making improvement.” Picking a start date feels like a decision. It brings the same relief a decision brings, which is why it is so easy to pick another one next week. Epictetus’s alternative fits in one word: “Immediately.”

He does call this habit “negligent and slothful,” but the person he describes isn’t idle. He is making proposal after proposal. A lot of modern procrastination looks the same, busy rather than lazy: reorganizing the to-do list, researching the best way to do the task, answering the easier emails first.

Then comes the contest. Epictetus lists what will be “presented to you”: anything “laborious or pleasant or glorious or inglorious.” In an ordinary week that means the report you dread and the show you would rather watch, the pitch that might win the room and the one that might fall flat. You don’t schedule these occasions. They arrive, and when they do, they are the event, “and they cannot be deferred.”

The last sentence removes the most respectable excuse, which is that you aren’t ready. Epictetus grants it: you are “not yet a Socrates.” He just doesn’t accept it as a reason to wait.

Marcus Aurelius: how long have you put this off?

The Meditations are notes Marcus Aurelius wrote for his own use, and this entry from Book 2 reads like a man catching himself in the act.

He doesn’t say what “these things” are, which makes the entry easy to borrow: put your own task in the blank. The first sentence rules out the usual defense, that there hasn’t been time. He remembers “how often thou hast received an opportunity” and let it pass: the quiet Saturday morning, the canceled meeting, the hour after the kids were asleep. The chances came and weren’t used.

The second sentence says why it matters: “a limit of time is fixed for thee,” and not by a manager. It is set by being mortal, the thought that later took the Latin label memento mori. Notice what Marcus wants the time for: “clearing away the clouds from thy mind.” His worry isn’t lost output but the work on himself, put off until there is no time left for it. That is the Stoic angle on procrastination throughout: the task matters, but what really gets postponed is the person you meant to be while doing it.

Marcus’s best-known struggle with starting is getting out of bed, at the opening of Book 5 (Meditations 5.1). That entry, with a plain-English reading, is on what Marcus Aurelius said about the morning.

Seneca: postponement is the greatest waste of life

Seneca’s essay On the Shortness of Life argues that life is long enough if we know how to use it, and most of the essay is about the ways we don’t. In chapter 9 he turns to people who are always getting ready to live.

Seneca’s target is a little different from someone who can’t face a tax return: busy, capable people who spend their best years earning a leisure they mean to enjoy once they have it. But the mechanism fits both. Postponement “takes away the present by promising something hereafter” (On the Shortness of Life 9), and the promise is what makes it work. I’ll do it tomorrow feels like a plan, a plan feels like having dealt with the thing, and today, the only time anything can be done, goes by. The whole chapter is in our guide to On the Shortness of Life, and more of Seneca and Marcus on time is collected in Stoic quotes on time.

Seneca made the same case to his friend Lucilius in the first of his Letters. The usual English translations of the Letters are still under copyright in many countries, so here is the app’s paraphrase, labeled as one:

The advice isn’t to be busier. It is to stop lending today to tomorrow. If time is the one thing that is really ours, as the letter says, procrastination is an especially bad bargain, because it loses the time twice: the task doesn’t get done, and the Sunday you spend avoiding it isn’t free either. You carry it all afternoon and enjoy none of it.

Why we delay: a judgment, not a schedule

For the Stoics, what we do follows from what we judge. Epictetus lists our impulses toward things and our aversions among the things that are up to us (Enchiridion 1). So not starting is also something you are doing, on the strength of some judgment about the task. Marcus says so bluntly:

The last clause, “thou choosest rather to become good to-morrow than to be good to-day” (Meditations 8.22), names the trade at the center of procrastination. Tomorrow you will be rested, focused and ready, so tomorrow’s version of the task always looks easier. Being good today costs something now; becoming good tomorrow costs nothing, which is why it so often wins. One way to read Marcus’s “Thou sufferest this justly” is that the nagging weight of the undone task is simply what that choice feels like from the inside.

Epictetus’s four words in chapter 51 also describe how a task can look to the person avoiding it. Some work is plainly laborious; if the trouble is that the whole project lands on you at once, the guide to overwhelm takes that up. Some loses to something pleasanter, the argument Marcus has with himself under the blankets in Meditations 5.1. The pair that does the most damage is the last one, glorious or inglorious. Once the result might bring praise or embarrassment, the task starts to feel like a verdict on you, and this is where the Stoics help most.

The verdict, whether it is the grade, the client’s reaction or what your manager thinks of the draft, is not up to you. Seneca’s line in chapter 9 fits exactly: we arrange “that which is in the hand of Fortune” and let go of “that which is in your own.” You spend the afternoon rehearsing how the work will be received, which was never yours, and lose the afternoon, which was. Marcus, in the same spirit, tells himself to get moving without looking around to see who will notice, not to expect Plato’s ideal Republic, and to be content if even the smallest thing goes well (Meditations 9.29, in our words). If fear of how it will go is what stops you, the free Worry exercise separates what you know from what you imagine.

Not every delay is a vice. Epictetus says that some things must be postponed for the present (Enchiridion 1), and Seneca calls delay the best remedy for anger (On Anger 3.12). A decision to do something later, made for a reason, is a judgment you can stand behind. The delay the Stoics criticized is the other kind, the one that passes itself off as a plan.

Start where the passages point

These passages don’t add up to a productivity system, and none of them promises that the urge to put things off will go away. What they change is the question: not when you will start, but what today requires of you. Marcus put it in one sentence:

You may know this line in a shorter modern translation; Long’s 1862 wording is slower but says the same thing (see fake and real Stoic quotes). Read next to Epictetus, it suggests three changes in how you handle the task you have been avoiding.

Stop choosing a date. Epictetus’s student keeps fixing a new day to begin, and each new date passes for a decision. The Stoic decision is about today: what would someone who means to do this do with this afternoon? Sometimes the honest answer is that the task should wait. Then say so, give it a date for a reason and stop carrying it around. Just don’t count tomorrow’s plan as today’s work.

Do it instead of describing it. Reading about focus, rewriting the to-do list and telling a friend that this is the week you finally deal with the garage are all versions of the talk Marcus tells himself to stop. His last words, “but be such,” ask for something you do, not something you say about yourself. The email to the landlord gets written by someone writing it, not by someone who has decided to become the kind of person who answers email promptly.

Care about the work, not the verdict. If the task feels heavy because of what the result might say about you, separate the two. The hour of work is yours. The reception belongs to Fortune. You can do the first well whatever happens with the second.

None of this is settled by one good resolution, and the Stoics didn’t expect it to be; they practiced daily. A passage read in the morning, like today’s teaching, gives the day’s choices something to answer to. At night, the Evening Examination, built on the review Seneca describes in On Anger (3.36), asks what you did well and what you would do better, an honest place to notice whether you did the thing or set another date, without punishing yourself. For a whole day built this way, see a Stoic daily routine and the Stoic morning routine.