When my routine broke, my thinking improved

I’m big on routine. I rely on it more than I’d probably like to admit. If my day doesn’t roughly follow the plan I’ve already run through in my head the night before, things tend to go sideways fairly quickly. Spontaneity doesn’t come naturally to me. When the rhythm’s off, I usually get frustrated, try to claw the day back into shape, and more often than not end up getting nowhere at all.

Routine gives me structure. It creates momentum and makes the workday feel contained and manageable. But I’ve realised it can also quietly limit thinking, especially when structure starts to replace reflection. Yesterday turned into a good reminder of that.

The plan disappeared completely when I locked myself out of the house during the mad nursery drop-off rush. Worst possible timing. Morning gone in one stupid moment. No laptop, no desk, no carefully staged start to the day I’d been relying on.

With no real option other than to wait it out, I took refuge in a coffee shop while my wife came to rescue me. Normally, I’d have written the day off at that point or forced myself to power through, trying to stick to a plan that clearly wasn’t working just to feel productive. Instead, I let the routine go.

Away from my desk, with fewer distractions and no way of pretending I was still following the original plan, I slowed down. I made a few calls I’d been putting off. I rethought the shape of the day rather than trying to force it back into place. I let a couple of ideas sit instead of immediately acting on them, and that pause changed everything.

What surprised me was how quickly clarity showed up once I stopped trying to control the situation. New opportunities felt possible again, the kind I’d normally have written off if I’d stayed glued to the screen trying to maintain momentum for momentum’s sake. The break in routine didn’t derail the day. It improved it.

That experience maps directly onto how I approach design work.

Why rigid routines limit good thinking

In creative work, routine is useful, but rigidity is not. When every step is locked in too early, there’s no room to reassess whether you’re still solving the right problem. You end up protecting the process rather than questioning it.

I see this often in early-stage brand projects. There’s pressure to move quickly, to make visible progress, to land on answers before the right questions have had time to surface. But strong brand work doesn’t come from speed alone. It comes from space, context, and considered decision-making.

This is why discovery and direction matter more to me than rushing into visuals. It’s also why I build time for thinking into my process, even when it feels counterintuitive. Clarity rarely appears on command. It tends to arrive when you step back just far enough to see the whole picture.

Designing space into the work

As a freelance graphic designer, my role isn’t just to execute ideas quickly. It’s to guide clients through uncertainty without pretending it doesn’t exist. That means allowing the middle of a project to feel unresolved at times, trusting that clarity will follow if the foundations are sound.

This approach shows up across the way I work, from brand identity projects to longer-term collaborations. The best outcomes I’ve been part of are the ones where we resisted the urge to lock everything down too early and instead let ideas evolve in response to real constraints, feedback, and context.

It’s the same lesson that broken routine taught me that morning. When the plan fell apart, the thinking improved.

Slowing down to move forward

Routine still matters to me. I still rely on it to get the work done. But I’m learning to design gaps into it on purpose. Space to step away from the screen. Space to rethink decisions. Space for better questions to emerge before committing to answers.

That mindset underpins much of the work I share in this Journal, and it’s a thread that runs through many of the projects I’ve worked on. Not everything needs to be forced into shape immediately. Sometimes progress comes from letting things breathe.

If this way of working resonates, you might find it useful to read more posts in the How I work series, or explore selected work to see how these ideas translate into real outcomes. And if you’re looking for brand support that values clarity, intent, and considered decision-making over reaction and speed, that’s exactly the kind of work I like to be involved in.

Sometimes the best progress happens when the plan breaks.