Most people have no idea what I do for a living, and to be honest, most of how I spend my time doesn’t look like the things I did when I was in college. Have things gone terribly wrong for me? What about Andrew? I’m pretty confident that his role as an architect is different than how he imagined it to be … and I think that this is all okay. It should be an interesting conversation, and possibly a mandatory exercise, to find out how architects actually spend their time. Chances are better than likely that the day to day experience for every single architect is unique with only a small bit of overlap … and that is what we are here to talk about. Welcome to EP 172: A Week in the Life of an Architect
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Today we are going to be talking about how we spend our time. I have answered this question as “A Day in the Life of an Architect” exactly 4 time previously on this website.
The very first “day in the life” sort of post that I ever wrote back on March 10, 2010. At this point, the website was barely 2 months old and I was with a firm that specialized in residential work. Since this was the first time I decided to talk about “a day in the life” I literally went minute by minute through my entire day, starting at 5:50am.
Fast forward over 4 years to December 1, 2014 … by this point I had changed jobs and was now working at a company where I had my name on the door, which suggests that I had some control over how I worked and spent my time. In this post, rather than going minute through minute along the tasks of my day, I broke into big chunks based on tasks … one of which was making a margarita.
Time for some more changes – on to job number 3 since I started the website. This particular day was the first to be immortalized into a podcast episode that went live on December 6, 2020. Andrew was struggling with Covid at the time of this recording so I had frequent guest and neighbor/architect Lane Acree on to discuss our particular days as it related to how we go about our business in the capacity of Principals at our firm. In an attempt to keep things somewhat fresh, beyond having another person’s perspective being added to the mix, we simply broke down our days into early morning, morning, lunch afternoon, and evening.
In each of these episodes, I typically choose a pretty interesting day – mostly because I wanted to look cool and that my job was exciting. I also think it is interesting to go back through these “day in the life” snapshots to see how my typical day changed as I changed firms and as I changed responsibilities. So rather than simply looking at a singular day that was selected because it was a “cool” day, we are going to change it up and actually look at a week of time so that we can avoid the possibility of selecting a singularly fabulous day.
Monday jump to 7:58
Bob
I can’t stand Monday … it is easily the worst day of the week. All the meetings associated with preparing everyone for the work to be done that week, as well as all the in-house obligations – meaning, I don’t actually get a lot of work done on Mondays but yet my day is always full and I start the week off behind every single time.
While the “Staffing Meeting” isn’t the first thing I do on a Monday morning, it is typically the first meeting I have. Since I have Project Manager responsibilities in the office, that means I have some dominion over who is working where and on what. This meeting is generally about making sure that people are all keep busy, but not overly so. Almost immediately upon the completion of this first meeting, I have a Marketing and Digital strategy meeting. There are about 4 of us that routinely attend this meeting and since I have some digital strategy experience, I was originally brought in to leverage my knowledge and past experiences. Now that I am a principal phasing into a larger role, more and more marketing responsibilities are falling on me.
Next up is a Principal’s meeting (at least this week, once a month this would be a financial meeting). This is a Monday lunch meeting (brown bag) and the topics can vary wildly. Most of the time we discuss strategies that could have an impact on all 4 of our offices (which mean’s firm policies and the like) but sometimes they can get a little Dallas office centric since Dallas is the largest office and most of the people (as well as Principals) are in this office.
In the early afternoon, I was excited to work on a residential project we have in the office. It is something that I thoroughly enjoy – mostly because I am good at it – but the real treat is that it feels like I am actually doing something pure. There aren’t a lot of moving parts on these residential projects and I have come to appreciate the complexities in their directness. After getting to work on this for a bit, I had to put either my Project Manager or my Principal hat on, I’m not entirely sure which, and check in with some co-workers that are developing a test fit for a student housing project we are proving up in Austin, Texas … but this is top secret stuff so I can’t get into any specifics.
My evening was pretty nice as I a had a Business Development dinner from 7:30 till 9:30pm. These are hit and miss on how enjoyable they are, but this one was a good time and while I was hoping to eat a better meal than I would have made for myself … I didn’t. As a side bar comment, I don’t think sous vide steaks are all that great – it is a volume production process and produces a predictable yet unremarkable product, but this is a conversation we can have offline if you are interested.
Employee Check ins = 1
7:15am till 10:00pm door to door
Andrew
This week happened to be the week of terminal reviews for the Master of Architecture program here at my program. As I am a studio instructor for the final year of the M.Arch program, I had to be involved in this process all week. What this entails is the student’s final project presentation after about eight months of work. The students begin their Final Study Project in August and this week is the final full presentation of that effort to their M. Arch committee. Each committee consists of three members who must “sign-off” on the work of the student. As the studio professor for this process, during this week I act as a type of “proctor” to keep the reviews running, making sure the committees know their roles, and recording the process as the studio professor. I participate in the review a small amount, but it is mostly the Committee that provides commentary and I am recording some of that while keep this all on schedule. Today, I have about 5/6 of these one hour session. For lunch I sat in a presentation by an interviewing faculty candidate as part of the hiring process. Then in the afternoon I go back to the reviews. There was also an AIAS meeting that evening. As I am the Faculty advisor, I had to stop by for a moment to make sure all was well. Today I did not stay for the entirety of the organizations meeting as it was already a long day. Home by about 7:30pm. I have some dinner and then do some work to prepare for tomorrow’s teaching. Maybe only an hour or two of work this evening.
Tuesday jump to 15:19
Bob
First day of real work – at least the kind that is typically billable.
This week I spent time working on a residential project for one of commercial clients. I’m not sure just what our obligations are but he brought a pre-existing plan in and I told him that I would make some adjustments to where he started and we could have some follow up conversations. This basically means that I am going to redo a ton of stuff. The image that I am showing above is the “redlines” that I put together for this residential project. Half of these marks represent teachable moments, and the other half are reflecting that actual direction or solution that I want to take on this project.
In addition to being a project designer, I am also a Project Manager on a few jobs, and it turns out that I might be pretty good in that role. I think all the years I spent doing nothing but high-end residential projects prepared me well to have conversations with people in a constructive manner. I am also pretty good with money and so without even knowing it, I stepped into a PM role and as a result, I spent time on this day working on PM stuff. We had a 5-storey tilt-wall office building project get to the 90% complete state a few years ago and our client – who I personally like – ran into some financial difficulties and the project essentially died. As a result of the reasons why it died, he didn’t pay his last invoice and since I am a good PM, I filed a lien on his property so that I could force a conversation about negotiating some sort of payment plan. Well, that got resolved about 11.5 months ago. Presumably because it was handled gracefully and with some tact, the owner called me back up 11.5 months later (which was about 2 weeks ago) and said his financing is now in place and he would like to resurrect the project. Since there were some “you didn’t pay your full invoice last time” conversations, we have some issues to work through, and this means I spent about an hour of my day talking with the consultants on this job, explaining the situation, and asking them to dust off their pencils and give me some new fees to pick the project back up again.
This is also the day that Andrew and I try and record the podcast episodes. Prepping for these episodes is normally spread out across a few days leading up to the actual recording, but I always have to put the finishing touches on my preparation. In the case of this week, I am overly burdened and I haven’t done the preparation that I need and as a result, recording today was kicked to Thursday night.
Next up … I worked on assembling a RFQ of sorts – it was more of an introduction for a project we are pursuing with another design firm. In this case, we would be acting as the architect of record because we have the technical experience for the work. Once it was completed, the fruit of our labor was a 54-page booklet – but the pages are super-landscape so it might be fair to say it was 108 pages.
I ended my day meeting with a past co-worker for a few drinks and to catch up things. It was scheduled to last about 90-minutes but what can I say … we had a good time and things ran long.
Employee Check ins = 1
7:15am till 10:00pm door to door
Andrew
I am typically able to start these days of a bit slower. I do not teach class until 3:55pm on Tuesdays. So I get to take an easy approach to my mornings. But I get up and work on the lecture that I am presenting later that day. Due to the fact that this is an all new course and I am working through the curriculum for the first time, it takes more preparation and work. So I spend the morning working through some of the content for later in the day. I also typically have three student meetings today. These are meeting with students for whom I am either the Chair of their M.Arch committee or a member. I meet with each of them for approximately an hour. This is not the students in my studio, but additional students. Somewhere in here I grab some lunch. Then I teach my course from 3:55 to 5:10. After that I usually chat with some colleagues and then head home. Every other Tuesday is set aside to record podcast. This week is my off week. So I am able to have a bit of downtime this evening. Although this evening, I complete a bit of advertisement editing for about an hour and a half.
Wednesday jump to 27:47
Bob
Wednesday is, oddly enough, a slow day for me typically. For the most part, I have an OAC (Owner/Architect/Contractor) meeting – but for this particular project, I am attending this meeting in the capacity of a project designer. The project is under construction as of about a month ago so as a result, I don’t have any heavy lifting to do on these calls. I continued to work on the residential project here and there when I could grab some time, but I also had to prepare for an employee evaluation (these are important). (If you would like to see more images of the project shown above and the project for which I had an OAC call – click here.)
I had some financial information to work through, as well as checking in on the student housing test fit exercise we were working through, but in terms of demands on my time, this was a light day (light because I was able to choose how I filled my time rather than having it dictated to me).
I went over to one of the other principals house and we worked on some re-staffing strategies. We had to do some layoffs this week and there is always some shuffling around that has to take place during these times. There is a lot of pain associated with this process and it is possible that these work sessions are a way that we emotionally work through the unpleasantness of staff reductions.
Employee Check ins = 1
Employee Evaluation = 1
7:15am till 10:00pm door to door (I am starting to recognize that 10:00 is apparently the time I turn into a pumpkin and need to be home from whatever “Ball” I am attending …)
Andrew
Another day full of M. Arch terminal reviews. I have a much fuller day today. While my morning is not full of reviews, I have one to start my morning at 8:00 am. Then I manage to attend the other studio I teach in the mornings. I spend time in that studio from 9 until it ends at noon. This is the week before their mid-term reviews, so I do some desk critiques and answer questions about deliverables and such. Luckily I have a “free” lunch time today so I can manage to have a lunch in the café in my building. Then the afternoon is full of M. Arch reviews. I have five that afternoon. So those are completed about 7:00pm and with the conversations after I manage to make it home around 8:00pm. Again, I have some dinner, and then make some time to work on tomorrow’s lecture content for the new course for a couple of hours.
Thursday jump to 34:30
Bob
Ahhhhhhh … Thursday. Generally I like Thursdays but not this particular Thursday.
My day started off great because I was able to spend about 2 hours right out of the gate on the house project. What a treat. Next up was to work on the BOKAP website updating content and just generally organizing the back of house stuff that nobody every sees unless the website breaks … and then everybody loses their minds. Spending time working on the website is pretty unfulfilling, but it is necessary, and I would much rather devote 15-30 minutes on it every few days than have something fail and then I am in triage mode and things/people are at Defcon 1.
On to my second OAC meeting of the week … but this time I have my project manager hat on and as a result, I have a much larger role to play in the orchestrating of the conversation and assignments being reviewed. What makes this particular meeting today so great is that for the past 33 weekly meetings, I was the one calling all the shots and preparing agendas and writing the meeting minutes, but we have broken ground on this particular project and the bulk of that responsibility has moved on to the contractor.
Next up was a little bit of a field trip as we just found out (as in we found out today – as in Thursday) that we were shortlisted for a super interesting project here in Dallas and we have to prepare an interview for this job the next Wednesday. You read that right … 4 business days later. Normally that isn’t a big deal but the request was for us to come into the project prepared to talk site development and building massing – so we had a lot of preparation work to start. And by start, I mean one of the partners and myself drove to the project site and walked the property and take context photos.
My time in the office concluded with more consultant phone calls, and some final preparation work for the podcast that Andrew and I are going to record later this evening (which is this one in case you hadn’t puzzled that out just yet.). I drove home, made a quick sandwich for dinner and then got back on the computer to finalize my notes for the podcast recording session that ran from 6:30pm until 8:30pm
Employee Check ins = 0
7:30am till 5:30pm door to door but recorded a podcast episode to extend in-home efforts until 8:30
Andrew
Thursday is much the same as a Tuesday for me this semester. I again get to ease into my mornings. I work on the lecture content for later that day. I meet with three other students for an about an hour each. Then I am off to class for my 1.5 hour lecture course. Once that is complete, I again chat with some colleagues. Now some days on Thursdays, we like to roll of and have a few drinks together on Thursdays. At least that is our plan. We actually manage to do this only about once every few weeks as it seem one of us always has something going on and we have to postpone. If you look at may calendar you can see during the mid-day I have three overlapping meetings. This is very typical for me on Tuesdays or Thursdays. Most of the time, I have to determine which meeting is at a critical point where I need to attend that specific meeting. But the overlap is fairly constant. So for many of those instances I only make 1/3 of the meetings. I do not like this at all, but when I am not the person scheduling the meeting and they are attempting to coordinate 10-15 schedules, I can understand
Friday jump to 41:09
Bob
As of this recording, I am technically talking about “the future” since Friday, Saturday and Sunday haven’t occurred yet, However, I am reliant on my calendar and my intentions to complete the week so I know what I will be doing. Since we ended up having some layoffs take place in the office (yesterday – my “Black Swan” event), I scheduled check-ins with as many employees that I could to discuss what happened, why it happened, and what does it mean for them. These conversations are extremely productive (at least I feel like they are) and depending on where you are at in the hierarchy of your position, I would modify the intensity of the conversation. Essentially what this means is that if you are about 5 or 6 years out of school, I got into the process that we utilize to predict staffing and project revenue, and how that forecast has an impact on our behavior. For a firm our size, this can get pretty complicated and there is no reason to assume that anyone intrinsically understands it until they are elevated to a position where they are exposed to this information. If nothing else, this underscores the importance of some level of business coursework at the collegiate level.
I had a lot of these check-in and they occupied the majority of my day.
A lot of times, probably more than I should admit on a recording, is that a handful of the principals will get together sometime after 3:00 and we will work on whatever we think we need to be working on from a leadership standpoint … and frequently have a cocktail while we are doing it. Today we talked about Thursday and Friday, and what sort of efforts need to be put in place for the following week.
Employee Check ins = 8
Andrew
Friday is another day of studio and reviews. Today is the last day of terminal M.Arch reviews and I only have a handful today. So I again start off at 8:00am with one and then another at 11:00am. In between those, I spend that time in my other studio checking on those students and helping out as I can while they complete their mid-term review prep. As this is the Friday before Spring Break, there is a small number of students around. There is another interviewing faculty candidate today, so I spend my lunch hour there and actually get to sit after and eat the provided box lunch and chat with colleagues. I have the rest of the reviews starting at 2:00pm and I am done by 5:00pm. I suppose that this point Spring Break has officially begun. So this week for the M.Arch candidates of which we have a total of 39, I was involved as a studio professor, a committee chair, or committee member for 19 of them. Busy week. Glad it is over and proud of all the work these students have accomplished. Today I do manage to go and have a few after work drinks with one of my good colleagues. We both had tough weeks and it was good to commiserate, drink, laugh, and have some decompression time heading into the break.
To match Bob’s statically analysis. This week = 19 one-hour M. Arch Terminal Project Reviews.
Saturday / Sunday jump to 48:09
Bob
Saturday is normally a day of recovery and I do everything in my power to not work at all – and I am typically successful at avoiding work, but not always. If I am lucky, I will get to do some BBQ smoking – which is the closest thing I have to a hobby. Ironically, I barely eat what I make since this sort of food is incredibly rich and decadent – most of the time I eat one serving and then package the rest up to give away.
Sunday’s are a different story.
At least every other week, I spend anywhere between 4 and 8 hours finalizing the podcast that we publish. This typically includes finalizing audio, creating and preparing graphics, publishing and promoting to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. If it is an off Sunday, I typically spend a few hours in the evening preparing for the week ahead, which means I am dealing with the “Sunday Scaries”. I know of a few other people who deal with this (not my name for this feeling but it seems appropriate so it has stuck with me). I typically experience some anxiety about what needs to be done, with a little bit of what I haven’t done mixed in for dramatic effect.
Andrew
Saturday is typically my day of “rest”. This basically means that I do very little work. I try not to do it anyway. If I spend only two hours on work, then I can deem the day work free. Most of the time this is the day I use to take care of normal things; grocery shopping, laundry, cleaning, oil changes, car washes, errands, etc. So I would not say the day is spent lounging around the house, although I admit some Saturdays are certainly spent that way. But I just try to spend Saturdays like I do not have any career concerns. This does not always work out.
Sunday for me is actually another workday most of the time. It is the day I use to begin to prepare for the next week. I get any studio lectures or content organized. I begin the content for the week’s lectures in my new course. I grade papers, redline projects, send any emails, catch up on departmental work, etc. I use this day to try and catch up or get ahead. My goal on these days is to stop working when it gets dark. Some days this is not possible and I stay up too late working on things for the week ahead. Again, I try hard not to do this. I definitely do not like starting the week tired. So Sunday is probably the one night a week I am diligent about a bed time. Early Mondays are difficult enough for me, I do not need to make them any more challenging by staying up until wee hours of the night.
Would You Rather jump to 55:39
This is definitely a question that requires a lot of discussion over the rules and requirements.
Would you rather be carried everywhere piggyback style, or like a baby?
I’m not sure that there is an acceptable answer for this question … but for some reason, it just feels like the effort required for me to ride around piggyback style seems less productive and potentially, more exhausting. No matter what, either one is going to be weird.
EP 172: A Week in the Life of an Architect
When Andrew and I decided to do a dedicated episode focused on a week of our activities, I could have avoided this particular week as it wasn’t an awesome week, full of glamorous activities that make it appear as if I am living the life. This was a rough week and while despite one day being above-average rough, I have to admit that the rest of it is pretty typical for me. The reason sharing this information might be of some value, is to show people that not all paths are the same even though we might have the same degree. Since this is technically the 5th entry in this evaluative process, you can even see from my own experience how my day-to-day tasks and responsibilities have changed over the last 15 years. It’s not necessarily good or bad – just part of an evolution of responsibilities.
Cheers,
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