Thailand as a reset

I’m lucky enough to spend time in Thailand each year, and I’ve started treating it as a reset rather than just a holiday.

This isn’t about working harder. It’s about creating space — to think more deeply about Editorial Intelligence, spend time with family, train, read and slow down.

I went into this year’s trip thinking I was simply stepping away from work. What actually happened was slightly stranger — and I should be honest about the unglamorous reason it happened. My wife’s family home isn’t set up for entertaining a restless content strategist. There wasn’t much to do. Once the meetings, briefs, deadlines and day-to-day production stopped, and boredom did the rest, a lot of things I’d been carrying around — ideas about AI visibility, customer evidence, events, research, Editorial Intelligence, how content feeds campaigns, how useful insight gets reused by other people — started connecting with each other.

None of those ideas appeared from nowhere while I was away. I’d already done the work: read the research, sat in the meetings, written the briefs, tested the workflows, kept the notes. What the break gave me was distance from the production loop, and that distance made the pattern easier to see.

We sometimes talk about creativity as if the answer is to consume more information or generate more ideas. I’m increasingly convinced the opposite can be true. Sometimes you already have enough information. What you’re missing is space for it to recombine.

That changes how I think about AI’s role in this too. AI is very good at helping me preserve context, retrieve old thinking and connect pieces I might otherwise forget — I’ve written before about treating GitHub as more than somewhere to store a website and about why accumulated context compounds rather than depreciates. But none of that removes the value of stepping away. If anything the combination is more useful: build the evidence while you’re working, keep the context somewhere retrievable, then give yourself enough distance to actually notice what it adds up to.

Deep work creates the pieces. Distance helps you see the pattern. AI can hold the pieces steady while you’re gone. It can’t do the noticing for you.

A good chunk of what connected this time isn’t just personal thinking to file away. It’s stuff I actually want to bring back into my day job, not keep as a separate project — which is exactly the loop I described in Editorial Intelligence is my experimental edge: the edge exists to feed the core, not replace it. This trip is the clearest evidence yet that the loop actually works.

Long term, I’d like to split my year between the UK and Thailand: six months collaborating with clients, speaking and building in the UK, and six months writing, developing ideas and spending time with family in Thailand. I don’t see that as stepping away from work. I see it as protecting the conditions that produce my best work.

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do with a complicated body of work isn’t add to it. It’s stop looking directly at it for a while.