Life of an Architect

10/19/2026

A quick look at your calendar can tell you exactly where you’re supposed to be throughout the day. Finding time to complete the work you’ll be discussing in those meetings might require a little more investigation. The conversations are necessary, and people need answers, but being available to help everyone else doesn’t get your own assignments finished. Schedules are supposed to organize our efforts, yet accommodating the people involved can leave very little room for the work those commitments require. Eventually, the office empties out, and you finally have time to concentrate, assuming you didn’t have anything else planned for your evening. Getting everything done has a cost, and agreeing to a schedule doesn’t always mean you had much say in creating it.

Today, Andrew and I are going to look at schedules and how they give us an idea of what to expect from our days, at least until the day actually starts. Most of us have a plan for the week, and there’s some comfort in knowing what needs to happen and when. The difficulty is that the calendar includes what we already know, while everything else comes up as we go.

This post is broken up into a few sections, partly our obligation for unplanned moments in the office, some of it involves the demands on our time outside the office and how those fall into the fire-drill of priorities, as well as discussing the trend to starting and stopping projects as you move from schematic design, design development, and construction documents as developers and clients look for funding and proof of concept. This process is hard on firms from a staff planning exercise, as well as maintaining any control over your financial planning.

Good times.

Special thanks to episode sponsor Construction Specialties for their ongoing support of the Life of an Architect podcast and website.

Ep 212: Schedules - Who Owns Your Time explores the demands of architectural practice, shifting deadlines, and the hidden cost of making every commitment work.

10/05/2026

The world is full of named principles that attempt to explain why people, projects, and organizations behave the way they do. Often described as laws, these are not scientific rules but concise observations about patterns that appear repeatedly in our work and our lives. Today, we are using eleven of these laws as lenses through which to examine how we manage time, make judgments, understand other people, and decide what deserves our attention.

The 11 laws we are discussing will address categories such as time and scheduling, people and staffing, measurement and priorities, judgment, and intent.

(My personal favorite is "Hanlon's Razor" ... if you don't know it, I've just made your day!)

Special thanks to episode sponsor Construction Specialties for their continued support.

Ep 211: Laws of the Universe looks at 11 principles that help architects understand time, staffing, priorities, judgment, and office culture.

09/21/2026

Most firms would say they value loyalty, and most employees would probably say they do too, which makes it interesting that both sides seem increasingly unsure what the word actually requires. Firms want people who are invested for the long term, while employees have become more careful about giving that commitment away before they understand what comes back in return. Somewhere along the way, what used to feel like a shared understanding started to look a lot more like a negotiation.

In Episode 210, “The Cost of Loyalty,” we look at how the relationship between employees and firms has changed, why loyalty can no longer be assumed, and what research says about engagement, compensation, career growth, flexibility, and retention. The conversation explores how architecture firms can rebuild genuine commitment by creating clearer opportunities, investing in people, and making professional growth worth staying for.

Special thanks to episode sponsor Construction Specialties for their ongoing support of the Life of an Architect podcast.

In Ep 210: The Cost of Loyalty, we look at how firms and employees both navigate changing expectations around pay, growth, trust, and commitment.

09/08/2026

Ask two architects what they charge for services on a residential project, and you’ll get two very different answers. Neither one is wrong, and neither one is padded, but a client hearing both for the first time has no way to know that. What actually separates those numbers rarely gets explained in the interview where they’re being compared, which means the comparison itself is usually meaningless before either side realizes it.

Today we are discussing residential contracts and we work our way through five structures, the five different ways of answering the same underlying question: who takes on the risk, and when. None of them is the right answer for every project, because there isn’t one. The right answer is whichever structure matches what you’re actually asking for, and that’s a harder thing to figure out at the start of a project than most clients expect it to be, mostly because nobody sits down and walks through it the way we just did.
That’s really the whole point of this conversation. A fee isn’t a mystery you’re supposed to accept on faith, and it isn’t a number you can meaningfully compare across firms without understanding what sits behind it. It’s a reflection of a decision, made early and often invisibly, about how much of the process you want handled for you and how much you’re willing to handle yourself. Get that decision right, and the fee stops feeling like a gamble and starts feeling like exactly what it should be: the cost of getting the outcome you actually wanted.

At the end of each section, a pro + con list is presented to help summarize and ideally bring some clarity to a topic that could benefit from it.

Special thanks to episode sponsor Construction Specialties for their ongoing support of the Life of an Architect podcast and website.

Ep 209: Understanding Residential Contracts breaks down five ways architects charge for residential work, along with the tradeoffs of each.

09/06/2026

Doing a bit of a photo dump … my belt is holding on for dear life

This ewe does not care

I really wanted to by a proper Norwegian sweater … still might

This used to be a school house … and the students arrive by boat

Old school fuse panel on a project I just started

I smoked 47lbs of pork this weekend, ended up with 26lbs when it was done. 14lbs went to coworkers and the rest to my freezer

Decided to try making apple-cinnamon hand pies.

I was asked to prepare a certain type of cocktail which requires a month of prep, mostly time spent with vodka marinating in pineapple

Also decided to keep my Betty Crocker hat on and made no-added sugar nectarine jam

And my lunch … toasted bun, pulled pork, a few white onions with a tiny dash of vinegar based bbq sauce. This was sandwich perfection!

08/29/2026

Years ago, my daughter told me she wanted to visit Norway and learn more about where our family came from, and I promised her that someday we would go together. We just returned from making good on that promise, but I always knew that Norway would only be part of what made this trip important to me. The real gift was getting uninterrupted time with my daughter at this particular point in her life. She is grown now, building a life that belongs entirely to her, and becoming someone I admire not simply because I am her father, but because of the person she has become. There is something incredibly special about watching your child grow into an adult and discovering that, while your role in their life changes, the relationship can become richer in ways you could not have understood when they were young.

Time together feels different now. Her life is increasingly filled with places she needs to be, things she wants to accomplish, and people who matter to her, which makes the fact that she still chooses to spend some of that time with me incredibly meaningful. I know there will be other trips and other experiences, and I certainly hope there are many of them, but I am also aware of how fortunate I am to have a daughter whose company I genuinely enjoy and who, for reasons I will try not to examine too closely, still seems to enjoy mine. Looking through these images, I see an incredible trip through Norway, but mostly I see time spent with someone who means more to me than I could ever adequately explain. I made my daughter a promise years ago that I would take her there, knowing even then that the destination would never matter as much to me as the person I would get to share it with.

08/28/2026

I have so many videos from this trip I should start my own OF site … OnlyFjords is what I’m thinking.

08/25/2026

Mostly Bergen - mostly too much fun.

08/22/2026

If I had to describe Norway so far, it would be a collection of every other countries greatest hits. Everywhere you turn is something beautiful and profound. Grateful that I am able to come here with my daughter (the church at the end was where my great grandfather is from - Isfjorden).

6 more days to go!