At my peak I was freelancing across six agencies simultaneously. Four Slack workspaces, multiple Jira boards, a constant stream of emails and Atlassian notifications. Each morning I’d spend the first forty minutes just orienting myself — which project, which client, where did I leave off — before I’d even opened Figma.
The work reflected it. Not bad. But not what I knew I was capable of. UX solutions felt adequate rather than elegant. Decisions felt forced. I started worrying I’d lost something — that creative burnout had finally caught up with me.
Then I took a week off client work entirely.
No Slack. No emails. Just a personal project — my own portfolio site — with zero external obligations.
Ideas came easily. Considered ones. I wasn’t retrofitting UX decisions made in a hurry two weeks ago. I wasn’t forcing solutions because I had thirty minutes before a call. Every module felt properly thought through. I finished sections in a morning that would normally take two days.
I felt like myself again. But it wasn’t just rest. The quality of the thinking was different — like problems had been worked on somewhere I wasn’t aware of.
Which, it turns out, they had been.
Your brain doesn’t stop working on a problem when you consciously stop thinking about it. During rest and sleep, the default mode network — the brain’s baseline activity — continues processing unresolved creative challenges in the background.
Psychologist Graham Wallas described this in 1926 as the Incubation stage in his model of the creative process: the period where you step away is where much of the most important creative work actually happens. The “aha” moments that feel like sudden inspiration are the surface result of sustained unconscious processing happening below conscious thought.
John Maeda captures the design implication perfectly in The Laws of Simplicity — reducing the number of things competing for your attention doesn’t diminish output, it amplifies it. Paul Rand understood this intuitively too. He rarely took on multiple major projects simultaneously, recognising the cognitive cost of splitting focus not just on time, but on the quality of thinking itself.
Research by Gloria Mark at UC Irvine found it takes an average of twenty-three minutes to fully return to a task after an interruption. Multiply that across six simultaneous client relationships and the cumulative cost is enormous — not just in time, but in the depth of creative engagement you can sustain.
I now work with fewer agencies simultaneously and batch work by client rather than fragmenting each day across multiple contexts. I protect my mornings for deep creative work before opening any communication channels. And I’ve learned to articulate, at the end of each session, what problem I want my brain working on overnight. It sounds odd. It works.
The ideal is working exclusively with a single agency on a single extended brief. Not because I can’t handle complexity, but because the quality of thinking that emerges from sustained focus on one problem is categorically different from the output of a fragmented mind.
The subconscious doesn’t multitask. Give it one problem and it will surprise you. Give it six and you’ll get fragments of all of them — adequate, functional, and never quite as good as you know you can be.
Paul Dowd is a UI/UX Designer and WordPress Developer based in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
