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.

https://www.lifeofanarchitect.com/an-actual-day-in-the-life/

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.

https://www.lifeofanarchitect.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-an-architect/

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.

https://www.lifeofanarchitect.com/ep-064-a-day-in-the-life-of-an-architect/

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

a look at my work calendar for the week we are discussing today

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

This is a look at Andrew's week as discussed.

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

redlines and plan concepts sketched out for the "Z House"

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.