Rest Is a Design Decision
On building a life you don't need to escape from.
Most people design their work. Very few design their lives.
I used to be one of them. Two weeks in summer, then back to it. That was the deal I accepted without questioning, because it was standard, because it felt like enough, because I hadn’t yet had the honest conversation with myself about what I actually needed.
When I decided to go solo, redesigning the year was one of the first things I did. Not around output targets or revenue projections, but around a simpler and more important question: what does a life I actually want to live look like in practice?
Five weeks off in summer was one of the first answers. Non-negotiable. Built in from the start.
Because those five weeks are not a holiday. They are something else entirely. They are time to disconnect from the frequency of work and reconnect with the parts of myself that go quiet during the year. Time for the people I love, really being with them, not fitting them around a calendar. Other places, other light, other rhythms, problems that matter in a completely different way. Time for reflection that has nowhere to go, for ideas that don’t have to become anything, for the kind of realisation that only arrives when you stop moving long enough for the picture to resolve.
That is not a reward for working hard enough. It is a design decision. Designing it in from the start is the difference between a life that depletes you and one that sustains you.
I’m taking five weeks this summer. I’m fully off. And I’m genuinely glad.
A small update on what happened recently.
Before I go, a small update on what this year has actually been. Two things happened in the first half of 2026 that I’m genuinely proud of.
The first is the Organizational Intelligence Institute, an institutional home for the work I’ve been doing for years at the intersection of leadership, organisational intelligence, and how creative people and knowledge workers actually function inside complex systems. For a long time, this work lived in coaching rooms, workshops, articles. Now it has a proper structure and a proper name. That matters to me more than I expected it to. I’m particularly happy to do this with two fantastic women, Divya and Mandy, who are a constant source of inspiration.
The second is a role at the European Institute of Design as Scientific Leader of the BA in Marketing and Management for the Creative Industries. I’m back in direct contact with education, with students, with the kinds of questions that resist easy answers. In that work, I’m including everything I've been writing about on Design Mavericks. Every recommendation I've made about how educators need to change what they put in front of students. The urgency of moving design upstream. Preparing designers not just for jobs that exist today, but for the role design needs to play in organisations tomorrow.
Both things feel right in a way that’s hard to articulate precisely, but that I’ve learned to trust.
While I’m away, something will still find you.
I’ve curated a summer reading series from the Design Mavericks archive: pieces I wrote that you may have missed, or that deserve a second read. Some of them are among the work I’m most proud of, and they didn’t always get the reach they deserved. Alongside those, a few reading suggestions. Books that have genuinely shifted something in how I think. Not a list of ten. Just the things that have actually mattered.
Consider it your summer reading list, arriving at a pace that won’t overwhelm you.
An honest note about the Design Mavericks subscription.
I’m rethinking the paid model. I don’t have the full answer yet. In September, there will be news. What I can tell you now is that everyone who chose to pay for this work when they didn’t have to matters to me in a special way. Your choice to support Design Mavericks meant that I managed to keep this space running for three years now. I’m thinking about how to recognise that properly, not with an empty thank-you, but in something real. More when I’m back.
I’ll be back in September, with news and new writing and a clearer sense of what the next chapter of Design Mavericks looks like.
Thank you for being here. It means more than you probably know.
See you on the other side of summer.