It's been a while

It's been a while since I posted, There just aren't enough hours in the day to keep everything up to date.

Time management is talked about as a skill which every Architect needs to learn, I'm not so sure! Architecture is an absorbing pursuit and I can find myself spending hours on items which less caring designers might fire out in minutes, just to get it right!

I used to think that I was good at managing my time, but the truth is I'm not - If I were I would know that I should stop designing when the profit starts running out, regardless of whether the design is good or not.

In a recent fee bid, I submitted what I thought was a reasonable quote based on what I saw as the work required. I later found out that another 'Architect' had undercut everyone by a significant margin and was working for a paltry sum. I thought long and hard about this and came to the conclusion that I could not have done the job for the tiny fee that the developer expected, I would have had to cut corners, produce poor drawings, not test my designs and the product wouldn't have been as good. If I was a time management Nazi, I might have worked out how many hours, minutes and seconds the job would have taken and stuck to it. but this is not how I work! I consider that the job of an Architect is to solve a problem, not to 'maybe' solve a problem within a given number of minutes.

I don't wear a watch, I don't have a clock in my office and I don't fill in a time sheet unless I really have to.