Designers are losing confidence. Not because they are getting worse.

Designers are losing confidence. Not because they are getting worse. Because the environment around them has changed faster than anyone expected.

Smaller teams. Layoffs. Solo designers running products that used to have five-person orgs. No design reviews. No feedback loops. You ship and you guess.

One habit that actually helps: write about your design decisions. Not for a portfolio. For yourself. Why did you pick this pattern? What did you almost do instead? What assumption is this based on?

Writing forces clarity that thinking alone does not. After 15 years, I still do it before high-stakes design reviews. It catches the holes I cannot see in my own reasoning.

Try it once. Open a doc, pick one decision you made this week, write three sentences: what you chose, what you almost chose, and why. See what surfaces.