One of the most important things I’ve ever learned about design comes from being a composer — that oftentimes, walking away from something I was struggling with and giving my brain space to breathe had a bigger impact on progress than if I tried to push through the difficulty. And this has been consistently true whether I’m composing, learning lines or choreography, mapping out systems, coding, working on strategy, or analyzing user data for important insights.
Giving your brain space to passively chew on the problem is just as important as the time you actively work on it. And that may feel unintuitive in a world where we are constantly pressured to be “doing.” But I guarantee that it will lead to better outcomes.
However, there's also an important caveat.
This kind of subconscious problem solving requires a deep, almost obsessive focus on a small set of problems and easily breaks down when trying to work on too many things at once. So it's just as important to orchestrate how much you are working on at any given time as well, as "more" will also inevitably lead to "worse" beyond a very small number.