How to use procrastination to your advantage
By The Guardian, April 6, 2026Today, the P-word has a bad reputation. Psychologists link it with increased anxiety, diminished self-esteem and depression.
And magazines feature articles with headlines such as “How to Stop Procrastinating, NOW!” A good number of the population have “chronic procrastination”, the lifelong tendency to avoid doing the things they should be doing.
A few years ago, this would have alarmed us – but now we no longer worry. We embrace days like this. Because of an obscure idea that the world discovered in a work of medieval theology has taught me how to relax.
Sloth never meant “laziness”. This was always a bad English translation. The original Greek word was acedia, and according to the Summa de vitiis, or “summary of the vices” – a bestseller from the 1230s – it was really a combination of boredom, depression, anxiety and despair.
It’s when you become a rudderless ship, knowing where your day, or your week, or your life ought to be steering, but unable to make it happen. Sloth isn’t boredom without a direction. It’s boredom despite a direction.
Two approaches to procrastination
Across the self-help texts of the 1200s and 1300s, there are two approaches to procrastination: one is destructive, but the other is inspiring, even life-affirming. And the difference depends on how we engage our hearts in those wasted moments.
Dante Alighieri, the Florentine author of The Divine Comedy, described the “wrong” approach as one of sleepwalking towards disaster. While climbing Mount Purgatory, Dante’s pilgrim stops for a nap on the terrace of Sloth. In a dream, he sees a woman who sings to him with the most beautiful voice.
The pilgrim is spellbound. But then Virgil (his guide up the mountain) lifts the woman’s dress to reveal a band of rotting flesh beneath. Dante’s message was lurid but powerful. Boredom anaesthetises our minds, leaving us open to manipulation. We become vulnerable to chasing after things that, although shiny and seductive, are often rotten at the core.
What was the answer, then? The best medieval theologians never believed it was possible to expunge any of the deadly sins altogether. They knew that they were hard-wired, constituting the impulses that make us all human. And so they felt the “right” approach to something like procrastination was to let it happen, but to direct it towards something that does us (and those around us) some good.
Bernard of Clairvaux, the greatest monastic intellectual Europe has ever produced, put it best: living a good life is like running a marathon over rough terrain. We know the direction we should be travelling, and we know where the finish line is, but we can’t expect to run the whole way at the same speed.
There will be days of apathy, of boredom, of numbness. And on those days, we need to make sure we stay awake and alert. So long as we engage our brains, there’s a sweetness even in the most trivial distraction that can awaken our sleeping hearts.