A little behind-the-scenes secret:

I don’t write these essays on Monday.

I write them about a week before they appear.

Otherwise, I’d be spending Monday mornings frantically searching for a topic while pretending to be a thoughtful person.

So last Monday, when it came time to write this week’s essay, I made a decision.

I wasn’t writing one.

Not because I didn’t have ideas.

I had plenty of ideas.

I have a running list of ideas. In fact, I have so many ideas that if I died tomorrow, my family would spend the next six months finding scraps of paper that say things like:

“Essay Idea: Why Every Great Pizza Place Has a Slightly Broken Door.”

Or:

“Essay Idea: Why Men Stand in Hardware Stores Looking at Tools They Already Own.”

Or:

“Essay Idea: Is It Possible to Have Too Many Coolers?”

(The answer, according to my wife, is yes. The answer, according to me, is that you simply haven’t encountered the right emergency yet.)

No, the reason I wasn’t writing last week’s essay was simple.

I didn’t feel like it.

I wanted one Monday where I could sit down with my coffee and enjoy the feeling of not having a deadline hanging over my head.

So I decided to take the day off.

The problem is that once you decide to take the day off, you suddenly become obsessed with the thing you’re not doing.

It’s like dieting.

The moment you say you’re not eating bread, your brain becomes a full-time bread appreciation society.

The moment you say you’re not checking your phone, you develop a mysterious need to check your phone.

And the moment you announce you’re not writing an essay, your mind starts writing one anyway.

By 9 a.m. I was thinking about the essay I wasn’t writing.

By 10 a.m. I had a title.

By 11 a.m. I had an opening paragraph.

By noon I was mentally editing sentences.

Which meant I wasn’t actually taking the day off.

I was simply working for free.

That’s the dirty little secret of creative work.

The people who do it for a living never really stop doing it.

A baker walks into a bakery and immediately starts looking at the bread.

A contractor notices every crooked molding in a room.

A television producer watches a show and spends the entire episode wondering what should have been cut.

And a writer who isn’t writing is usually just writing silently.

The worst part is that the people around you think you’re relaxing.

They see a guy staring out a window.

What they don’t realize is that he’s currently rewriting the third paragraph of something he promised himself he wasn’t going to write.

So here I am.

Writing the essay I wasn’t going to write.

Which means I failed.

Or maybe I succeeded.

I’m not sure.

What I do know is that I spent more time thinking about not writing this essay than it would have taken to simply write it in the first place.

And if there’s a lesson in that, it’s this:

Sometimes avoiding work is harder than doing it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, next Monday’s essay isn’t going to write itself.

If this resonates with you, I publish essays like this every Monday morning. If you’d like them in your inbox, you can sign up here.