How to Keep Making Things When Making Things Is Your Job

Decision fatigue, burnout, and the pressure to always create. What actually works for keeping personal design projects alive.

There’s an irony that most designers don’t talk about openly: keeping personal creative projects alive as a designer gets harder the more successful you become professionally.

You spend all day making decisions about color, layout, hierarchy, and interaction. By evening, the idea of opening Figma for a personal project feels like asking a chef to cook dinner after a double shift. The creative muscle is exhausted. Keeping personal creative projects going feels impossible. The inspiration well feels dry. I wrote about this from a mental health perspective too. And the personal design projects that once excited you start collecting dust alongside your unused sketchbooks.

I’ve been through this cycle more than once, and I don’t think there’s a clean fix. But I’ve figured out a few things that help.

The Creative Energy Problem Is Real

Let’s be honest about what’s happening here. Creative work uses a specific type of cognitive energy. It’s not just ”being tired”, it’s decision fatigue. A typical design day involves hundreds of micro-decisions, and each one draws from the same well that your personal projects need.

This means the standard productivity advice, ”just wake up earlier,” ”use your weekends,” ”be more disciplined”, often misses the point. The issue isn’t time management. It’s energy management. You might have two free hours on a Saturday morning, but if your creative battery is at 3%, your personal creative projects produce nothing meaningful and, those hours produce nothing meaningful leave you feeling worse.

Acknowledging this isn’t making excuses. Maintaining personal creative projects as a designer requires a different approach than just time management. It’s being realistic about what creative work actually requires.

Keeping Personal Creative Projects Alive as a Designer

Separate the Tools, Separate the Mindset

When my personal work uses the exact same tools and processes as my client work, it stops feeling like my work. It feels like more of the same.

I’ve found that changing the medium, even slightly, helps create a mental boundary. If client work is all Figma and screens, personal work might be sketching, physical materials, or a completely different design context. The point isn’t that the tools matter technically. It’s that the ritual of switching signals to your brain: this is different. This is yours.

Lower the Bar Dramatically

The personal projects that actually survive are the ones where I gave myself permission to be bad at them. The ones that died were the ones where I set the bar at ”portfolio-worthy.”

When everything you make professionally needs to be polished and client-ready, your personal work becomes the one space where it doesn’t have to be. A rough sketch, an ugly experiment, a half-formed idea, these are valuable precisely because no one is evaluating them.

The paradox is that the good stuff usually emerges from the bad stuff. But only if you let the bad stuff exist.

Protect the Spark, Not the Schedule

I used to try blocking time for personal projects, Tuesday evenings, Saturday mornings, whatever. It never worked consistently because creative energy doesn’t follow a calendar.

What works better for me is protecting the spark whenever it shows up. If I get an idea during a lunch break, I write it down immediately, not the whole thing, just enough to capture the energy behind it. A sentence, a rough sketch, a screenshot of something that triggered the idea.

Then when I do have energy, I have a collection of sparks to pick from. Starting from a spark is infinitely easier than starting from a blank canvas after a full work week.

Make It Small Enough to Finish

Unfinished personal projects are motivation killers. Every abandoned project teaches your brain that personal work doesn’t get completed, which makes starting the next one harder.

I’ve started scoping personal projects much smaller than I think they should be. Instead of ”redesign my entire portfolio,” it’s ”design one page.” Instead of ”build a concept app,” it’s ”design three screens.” Something I can realistically finish in the energy I actually have, not the energy I wish I had.

Finishing something small feels better than abandoning something ambitious.

Accept the Creative Seasons

There are seasons when client work is intense and personal projects go quiet. That’s not failure, that’s normal. The pressure to constantly be creating, constantly have side projects, constantly be building your personal brand on top of your professional work, it’s a recipe for burnout, not creativity.

Some months, the personal work flows. Some months, it doesn’t. The important thing is not forcing it during the dry seasons and not wasting the productive seasons on guilt about the dry ones.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Passion Projects

There’s a narrative in the design community that you should always be working on something personal, that the best designers are the ones who never stop creating, that if you’re not doing side projects you’re falling behind.

I think that narrative is harmful.

As Cal Newport explores in Ness Labs writes about creative energy management, creative output depends on managing cognitive energy, not just hours. Creative rest is not the same as creative stagnation. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do for your personal creative work is nothing at all. Go for a walk. Read something that has nothing to do with design. Watch a terrible movie. Let your brain process all the input it’s been absorbing professionally.

The ideas that come after rest are almost always better than the ones you force out of exhaustion.

What I’m Trying Now

I keep a running list of sparks, ideas, references, screenshots, half-formed thoughts. No pressure to act on any of them. When energy shows up, I pick the one that excites me most in that moment and give it whatever time I have.

Some of these become portfolio pieces. Most don’t. That’s fine.

The goal isn’t to produce more work. It’s to keep the relationship with creative work healthy, so that design stays something I love doing, not just something I’m good at getting paid for.

That distinction matters more the longer you do this. Personal creative projects for a designer are not side hustles. They are the thing that keeps the work meaningful. If you are starting fresh and building a portfolio alongside personal work, I wrote a guide on building a design portfolio from scratch that covers how to balance it.