The best design decision I made this year was doing less

A few months ago, I closed my laptop at 6pm on a Thursday. No unfinished tasks. No Slack messages to catch up on. No “just one more thing.” I made dinner, went for a walk with Bianca, played with the cat, and read a book that had nothing to do with design.

The next morning, I solved a problem I’d been stuck on for a week, in about fifteen minutes.

I’m not writing this to sound like a productivity guru. I’m writing it because I spent years believing the opposite – that more hours meant better work, that pushing through was the professional thing to do, that rest was something you earned after the deadline, not before it.

I was wrong and I think a lot of you might be stuck in the same loop.

Here’s what I used to do.

• I’d get stuck on a layout or a flow and I’d grind.

• Move things around.

• Try another approach. Undo. Try again.

Two hours would pass and I’d have seventeen versions that all felt slightly wrong, plus a growing sense of panic that maybe I just wasn’t good enough.

The thing nobody told me early in my career is that creative work doesn’t respond to brute force. Your brain needs space to make connections.

There’s actual research behind this – when you step away from a problem, your brain keeps processing it in the background. It’s called incubation, and it’s not some wellness trend. It’s how creativity actually works.

But knowing this and doing it are two different things, because stepping away when you’re stuck feels irresponsible. It feels like giving up. Especially when you have a deadline, and especially when the voice in your head is telling you that a “real designer” would just figure it out.

That voice is lying, by the way. The real designers I admire most – the ones doing genuinely beautiful, thoughtful work – are almost always the ones who protect their rest the hardest.

I want to share a few small shifts that changed things for me. Not a system. Not a framework. Just things I tried that actually helped.

I stopped designing when I’m tired. This sounds obvious, but I used to push through fatigue all the time. Now, when I notice my decisions getting worse – when I’m second-guessing every color choice or rearranging the same elements in circles – I stop. I close the file. I go do something else. Sometimes that means I stop an hour earlier than planned. And almost every time, I make up that hour the next morning in the first thirty minutes, because my brain is fresh and the answer is just... there.

I started walking without headphones. I used to fill every spare minute with podcasts, YouTube videos, design content. Always learning, always consuming. Then I tried walking in silence and it felt uncomfortable at first – like I was wasting time. But those quiet walks became where my best ideas showed up. Not design ideas specifically. More like clarity. A sense of “oh, that’s what’s bothering me about that project” or “wait, what if I tried it this way.” Your brain needs boredom to be creative. I really believe that.

I gave myself permission to have a slow week. Not every week needs to be your most productive week. Some weeks, you’re firing on all cylinders and shipping great work. Other weeks, you’re maintaining, processing, recovering. Both are necessary. I used to feel guilty about the slow weeks. Now I trust them, because the fast weeks that follow are always better.

I stopped comparing my Tuesday to someone else’s highlight reel. Social media is full of designers sharing their wins, their launches, their perfect case studies, their new client or massive profit and it’s easy to scroll through that and feel like you’re falling behind. But you’re comparing your behind-the-scenes to their final cut. You’re comparing your messy Wednesday afternoon to their carefully curated piece. That comparison will drain you faster than any deadline.

I think the design community has a complicated relationship with rest. On one hand, everyone talks about work-life balance. On the other hand, there’s this unspoken pressure to always be learning, always have a side project, always be “building your brand.” The message is basically: rest, but also never stop.

I fell into this trap hard. I had my day job, my newsletter, a side project, a reading list that kept growing, and this constant low-level anxiety that I should be doing more. I was resting on paper – taking weekends off, sleeping eight hours – but my brain never actually stopped.

The shift for me was accepting that rest isn’t just “not working.” It’s actively doing things that have nothing to do with design. Cleaning. Running. Hiking. Travelling. Reading fiction. Having a conversation that doesn’t involve pixels or user flows. Letting my identity be bigger than “designer.”

That sounds simple and it is, but simple isn’t the same as easy.

If you’re reading this and feeling stretched thin right now, I want you to know something. You’re probably doing better than you think. The fact that you care enough about your craft to read newsletters about it, to worry about whether your work is good enough, to push yourself to improve – that already puts you ahead of most people.

But caring about your work and running yourself into the ground are not the same thing. You can be ambitious and rested. You can be driven and kind to yourself. You can take a slow week and still be a great designer.

The work will be there tomorrow.

It’ll actually be better tomorrow if you give yourself a real break today.

Trust me. I fought this for years and the version of me that rests properly does better work than the version that grinds until midnight ever did. It’s not even close.

So close the laptop. Go for a walk. Read something for fun. The Figma file will wait.

You have permission :)

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See you next week 🙌

— Balint