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 som