Time Sheets

In my previous position as a project architect in a corporate architecture firm, I was often scrutinized not only for the quality of my work (IE technical execution, managing schedules, client relationships, etc), but also for how much time I spent doing it. The owners of the firm wanted to know exactly how much time I was spending on each project. Their profit consisted primarily in the difference between how much I was getting paid (a fixed cost, my salary) versus how much the client had agreed to pay for the tasks I was executing. Conversely, the clients had an opportunity to review, and often contest how much time I proposed to spend on my work. Did this really have to take so long? Can’t I do it in less time? Not only did I have to be a meticulous detailer, inspired designer and accommodating service professional but I had to do everything in the “right” amount of time in order for my clients and my bosses to be happy.


The reality of the conundrum was often solved by underbilling, or to put it in another way to spend my own time doing work for my clients and not get paid for it (not me nor the owners of the firm). This way, the work is done (the owners are happy) and the clients are charged only the amount of hours they agreed to pay (and they are happy). I’m not happy since I worked 60 hours this week but only 40 hours can be charged to the client and I don’t get overtime or any other compensation for my time, but as was often the case in corporate architecture, no one is really inquiring about my happiness.

On the owner’s side, things are quite different. Now, my employer (the State of New York) is not profiting from the margin between my earnings and what someone else will pay for my time. My salary is paid from bonds issued by the state of New York, the same way all the buildings that I’m working on are financed. I no longer fill out a detailed time sheet breaking down how much time I spent on which project. I am held accountable for the quality of my work but less from a financial standpoint; I am rarely called upon to work until the wee hours of the morning while not billing for my time.

My responsibilities are primarily to oversee projects that are well conceived (fills a real and tangible need for the college), executed correctly (thoughtfully and thoroughly detailed set of documents prepared by architects for a reasonable fee), and constructed on time, on budget. My tasks are more managerial in nature and involve no design or production of drawings. The upside is that my work is not the means to a profit for the owners of the firm, and this is an enormous shift. The down side is that I am not growing in technical skills. Put another way, I appreciate and enjoy going home to have dinner with my family every night, but I also miss the struggles to come up with solutions to design/technical challenges presented to me. I am now more of an evaluator and hand out “Atta-boy’s” to the architect rather than burn the midnight oil and reams of tracing paper trying to conceive of an elegant solution to the problems at hand. Such is the bargain with the Devil.