On Rest: Why I Stop Designing Every Weekend, Even When I Don't Want To
There's a particular Saturday morning I still think about. I was standing in my own kitchen with a coffee going cold, scrolling through a client's mood board on my phone, moving a cushion three pixels to the left for the fourth time that week. Nobody had asked me to do that on a Saturday. I'd just forgotten how to stop.
That was a few years ago now, early on in the studio, when I thought being available every hour was the same thing as being good at my job. It isn't. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to work that out, and longer still to actually change how I worked. These days I don't open a floor plan, a fabric swatch or a client email on a Saturday or Sunday unless something's genuinely on fire. Most weeks, nothing is.
Burnout Doesn't Look Like You Think It Will
I always imagined burnout as something dramatic, a breakdown, a wall you hit and can't get past. What actually happened was quieter and harder to notice. My eye got worse before anything else did. I'd stand in a client's living room and everything would look fine, technically correct, nothing wrong with it, and also nothing interesting about it either. I couldn't tell anymore which choices had feeling in them and which were just competent. That's the real cost of never stopping. Not exhaustion you can point to, but a slow flattening of the thing you're actually paid for, which is taste, instinct, the ability to notice.
As a Sydney interior designer, my job depends entirely on still being able to see a room properly, to notice that the light falls differently in a north-facing living room than it does in a south-facing one, that a particular green looks completely different against sandstone than it does against render. That noticing takes a rested mind. I don't think I fully understood that until I'd lost it for a while.
What Weekends Are Actually For
So now weekends are, deliberately, not for the studio. I walk. I go to Bronte and sit and look at nothing in particular for longer than feels productive. I cook something slow on a Sunday that has no reason to be efficient. None of this is styled or photographed for the studio's Instagram, which took some getting used to, because there's a pull in this industry to make even your rest look like content.
The point isn't the walk or the cooking specifically. It's that I'm doing something with no client attached to it, nothing to justify, nothing to optimise. A weekend spent like that gives my eye somewhere to reset, so that on Monday I can walk back into a project and actually see it again, rather than just recognising it.
I'd say the same thing to anyone in a creative business, not just designers. If you can't remember the last weekend you didn't check email, that's not dedication. That's just a slower way of getting worse at your job.
The Work Gets Better When I Stop
The honest measure of this, for me, has been the work itself. The projects I'm proudest of over the last couple of years have almost all had a moment where I stepped away from them for a weekend and came back with a better idea than the one I'd been circling on Friday afternoon. A rug choice that had felt stuck suddenly felt obvious on Monday morning. A layout I'd been forcing revealed itself properly after two days of not thinking about it at all.
I used to feel guilty telling clients I wouldn't be reachable on weekends. Now I think it's part of what they're paying for, a designer who still has something left to notice with, rather than one running on fumes and habit.
If you're in the middle of your own busy season, whatever that looks like for you, I'd genuinely encourage taking the weekend off from it, properly off, and seeing what Monday looks like on the other side. And if you ever want to talk through a project or just say hello, come find me on Instagram at @laidbacklee_design, where I try to share the studio's actual rhythm, rest included, not just the finished rooms.
