The Exhausted Architect: Moving from Overwork to Freedom and Flow | 705

0:00Rion Willard: The reason why everything feels like it's being held together with shoestrings and duct tape is because you're not slowing down. Hello, Architect Nation, and welcome back. This is the place for you if you run an architectural design practice of any sort. And the question I have for you today is this. What if the secret to better work, stronger leadership, and more freedom weren't working harder? Well, that could possibly be the best news that you've ever heard. And today, we're challenging one of the most deep-rooted beliefs in architecture. The idea that exhaustion is simply the price you pay to be able to do great work.

0:35Rion Willard: In this episode, my co-founder Ryan Willard, our co-host here on Business of Architecture, and I discuss why creating more drawings, working longer hours, and pushing harder may actually be producing worse results for you and your clients. The hack that one firm owner used to turn 24 hours of expected work into just a few focused hours without lowering the quality of the project. and why protecting time for rest may be one of your most productive decisions that you can make for your firm, your team, and your best ideas. And now a word from today's sponsor. A while ago, we began to hear reports of a company that was helping some of our clients build remote teams.

1:16Rion Willard: We looked into it more closely and discovered the company World Teams that was helping small architectural practitioners build remote teams that were both capable and qualified. We were intrigued by another business that are addressing one of the critical pain points for small architectural practices, which is the ability to grow and shrink a team effectively, to be able to handle higher workflow without having to staff up significantly, and also being very sensitive about labor costs. World Teams is built to address these issues. World Teams is a small but mighty company that helps architectural practices build high-performing remote teams quickly, beneficently, saving you the headache of sorting resumes and interviewing underqualified candidates.

1:56Rion Willard: World Teams operates in your time zone and prioritizes near-native English speakers, ensuring clear and efficient communication with your remote team members. They have flexible contracts so you can adjust your team size as your needs evolve. Additionally, you're connected directly with your skilled professionals, which fosters trust and collaboration, and WorldTeams helps you reduce your operating cost without compromising the quality that's so important to a practice. To download a free guide for building a remote team for a small architectural practice, go to businessofarchitecture.com forward slash worldteams.

2:31Rion Willard: That's one word, businessofarchitecture.com forward slash worldteams. Hello and welcome back, Architect Nation. Today we're talking about the exhausted architect. This is a theme that came up recently in our smart practice workshop where we were entering and welcoming a new group of architects who are implementing the smart practice method in their practices. We're here recording in Puerto Rico and happy to be here with my co-host and business of architecture co-founder Ryan Willard. Ryan, how are you doing today? I'm amazing. Very excited to be here in this amazing podcast studio, beautifully learned to us by Ricardo Alvarez.

3:09We're here in his offices, and we're here leading a couple of live events.

3:16Rion Willard: yeah and there was so the we have about six to seven maybe eight episodes where we're going to talk about some of the challenges that the participants of the past the workshop that we did last week yeah that they brought up some of the challenges right from the trenches real these are architects are running their practices right now anywhere from zero employees to 12 employees spanning the whole range. And one of the challenges that came up is just pure exhaustion. So today we're going to talk about how this impacts design professionals, how this may impact you as a design firm owner, and why working harder is actually making things worse.

4:00Rion Willard: Which sometimes that's our default to go into, I'm just going to work harder. I'm going to press more. I'm going to stay up later. I'm going to try to be better at time management. I'm going to try to fit everything into my calendar, which ultimately leads to burnout, exhaustion, tiredness. I think us as architects, we certainly in our gestation period, when we're being trained, that it's almost like to become an architect, you need to be someone who has the resilience of being able to be put through very arduous working conditions. certainly if you make it through architecture school you've you've uh you've run the gauntlet exactly so to speak i was looking at a uh one of these tables the other day that was talking about the most hours in study for courses and at the top was architecture and i've seen that before and it was a between it was about 17 to 22 hours when you're in study and lecture and then of course as an architect then you have your own design studios the time and energy that you put into the projects so from a very early age we are trained to work hard to produce results like that is in our dna as architects when i was at university the tutors used to joke when we grade you we weigh your portfolio first as a sort of demonstration of like that's how much work you've you've put in we're not really it's almost like we don't care about the results that you produce it's more to do with a quantity and so there's a quantity of effort that is being measured and we've been trained to associate success and results with a measure of energy and effort and that carries through into our businesses and it becomes much more problematic in business and my assertion as well would be that for those of us running architecture businesses that one of the biggest challenges is we often call it efficiency but perhaps it's one of these hangover effects of having people working too hard in the wrong direction.

6:21Rion Willard: Yeah, which is a great distinction between efficiency and effectiveness. Yes. You can be very, very efficient, but not very effective. Exactly. So we can be very efficient in the wrong things. And us as architects, typically design trumps everything. and when we look at how we're scheduling out a design project, usually architects will be cognizant of when the deadline is and then it's all about putting in as much energy, many hours as physically possible between now and the deadline as opposed to limiting the amount of hours that we're going to be working on a project and being very focused on what are the key results that the client is expecting or that you're expecting or that are needed for the project to move ahead to the next item on that deadline, which is a different conversation.

7:17And I'll give you an example of this. A few weeks ago, I had one of our clients and it was Monday night and they had a deadline or a meeting presentation that they were going to be hosting with a client on the Wednesday evening. and this practice owner said I've got 24 hours I've got 24 hours worth of work to do between now Monday night and Wednesday night and I was like yikes that doesn't sound particularly pleasant where did the 24 hours come from well I need to do this this and this and this and this and there was a big long list of deliverables and drawings okay what does the client actually need what are they expecting?

7:58What's the sort of effective result to be able to move the conversation through to the next step? And what's the bare minimum that you could attend with to still get that powerful result? So that starts to be a different conversation. And we managed to reduce the 24 hours down to about five or eight, much more manageable.

8:21Rion Willard: Effectiveness versus efficiency. Exactly. Yeah, just imagine the time you spent doing that, 30 minutes, 15 minutes prioritizing. So that's highly valuable work. So there's three sub-problems here that we've identified. The first one is perhaps in your practice work has expanded to fill every available hour. And I'd even go beyond that to say that if it's not literally filling your time, it's probably filling your mental space, which is just as if maybe perhaps even more challenging. Yeah. Because I know myself, even running our business, I find myself sometimes with my children, spending time with them, maybe taking one of my daughters out for a little daddy-daughter date and finding my mind wandering off and no longer present with the present moment.

9:10Rion Willard: That has a real impact. So not to mention the work, of course, can expand as well. Not uncommon as a firm owner to come in early, leave late, work weekends, work nights. Hopefully that's not the case for you, but it wouldn't be out of the ordinary if it was. Yeah. And we also have a kind of sort of virtuousness to working all the time as an architect. Well, I think it comes from a virtuous place as well. It's very, one thing I love about how architects operate in general, especially firm owners, is they are typically very passionate about their work. They want to do the best job possible. They want to make sure that they deliver excellent service to the clients.

9:55Rion Willard: This is all very noble. They want to make sure they get the best projects out there, the best products that are designed. So it all comes from a very, and they're very powerful. They have very strong reserves of energy. They can work for long amounts of time and put in a lot of effort, physical effort to create results, which is all very noble. and at the same time, it can also be a bit of Achilles heel because was it Parkinson's law that says that a task will expand to fill the available time? So same thing with your schedule. If you're running a firm and you're used to working a lot, you're passionate about your business, it's almost a default that if you don't set boundaries to that, it's just going to expand.

10:36Rion Willard: If you're available to work on weekends, you'll be working weekends. If you're available to work on nights, you'll be having meetings during the evenings. If you're willing to get up at 2 a.m. in the morning or 4 a.m. in the morning, you'll be getting up at 2 or 4 a.m. in the morning. I thought it was interesting in our workshop that we did last week when we asked the question, how many of you have done an all-nighter in the last 12 months? And it was pretty much everybody in the room. And then when I expanded it to 18 months, it was everybody in the room, which is... One participant said, I did that last week.

11:11Rion Willard: yeah in order to be here yeah and I I found that was a little bit shocking I mean I know for me probably one of the worst tortures could possibly be is making me stay up all night yeah I remember that was one thing I hated about design school was actually having to stay up all because I am a wreck if I don't get my sleep yeah and then even in my working years I had to do that as well when a design project was due or some deadline, just trying to rush it at the end, staying up all night to pull it through. Just about 2 a.m. starting to really hate every single minute, just saying to myself, I'm never going to do this again.

11:48And again, this is one of these hangovers from university culture when we study. Like when I was at the Bartlett, we had a very sad thing happen when one of the students committed suicide in the first year and they brought in psychologists and and people to sort of tend to the architecture students and they were saying that actually the architecture students had one of the highest levels of sort of mental well-being concerns and they were like it was unhealthy work culture that's there so one thing that they started to do was like they got rid of the 24-hour studio so that nobody could stay longer you know late into the night and do I mean it didn't necessarily work because it just meant that people went home and stayed up all night anyway and then we had this sort of bizarre scenario where students were you would stay you'd hide yourself in the studio so particularly towards the towards the end of the end of the year when there was like these big sort of hand-ins due like there would be groups of us I may or may not have been involved in this.

12:57And you would hide under a table or we used to have like an anechoic chamber, like one of those sound chambers, and people would hide in there and then the security card would go around, do his thing, disappear, and then the lights would come back and all the students would come out and they're working.

13:15Rion Willard: I could just imagine. That would be great. It's almost like the cockroaches coming out when you flip the lights off, right? Terrible. We had a situation where it was the run-up towards the hand-in and we were in a basement studio. There was like maybe five or six of us and the drainage system broke in the studio, which meant that we had like an open drain or something like that, like a sort of, it was like a drain. Anyway, it backed up and we had raw sewage coming out into our studio. so obviously we went and told the the building maintenance supers hey this has happened um and what they ended up doing was they closed the whole building down for a day so it was really terrible and nobody could work in the building um and you know we lost a day of a day of work okay fine they brought people in they fixed it about a week later and now we're getting really close to the deadline of our submission the same thing happened again and we were like we're not going to tell anybody wow and so this this raw sewage kind of pulled out and like and we were all reluctant to talk about it because we didn't want to um we didn't want the building to be closed down again and for it to interrupt so this is kind of sort of crazy very myopically focused relentlessness which in some senses is very admirable in another sense you know we were kind of young and being irresponsible obviously the sewage got really really bad inside of our studio and we had to tell them again and of course they closed down just our studio and then we had all this big scramble of had to relocate our drawing boards find somewhere else to work and then we had to beg them to give us an extension on the time because you know we had to relocate our studios but i i bring those stories up because it they're kind of indicative of the culture that we're brought up in an architecture to throw every waking hour at a project or at a problem and we're we're kind of rewarded for it at university in a bizarre way yeah i do actually think i do remember a lot of the students who probably were the real top performers they were probably a lot more controlled in their time particularly if they were a bit more old they They were older.

15:38It wasn't so sort of just throw hours at everything. But again, this is a very real issue to fill every available hour with doing the work, whether it's conscious or unconscious. This is very symptomatic of architecture.

15:56Rion Willard: Well, and the other danger or thing that's driving this is there is a sense of accomplishment. There's a reward we get from going through these extremes to get the work done, pulling all-nighters. There's a sense of, I know for myself, a sense of virtuousness or a sense of moral high ground or I'm working really hard. I'm a hard worker. I'm doing what it takes. It can support our ego. It can support our identity of being a hard worker. On the flip side of that, what's also interesting is as business owners, and we've seen this and I've seen this in our business, but as architectural firm owners start to become more liberated in the practice, they have more free time, like Romero Torres would be a good example.

16:45Rion Willard: suddenly they can start to feel guilty that they're not working so the inverse can happen whereas they feel virtuous and they feel like they're working really hard and there's a sense of moral completeness moral wholeness or moral virtuousness with working so hard and putting in so many hours the reverse can happen where if they're have a more flexible schedule or they're out of the office doing business development or taking a day off to go golfing or take a nice vacation, then they can start to feel guilty about the time that they're spending away from the office or the fact that they're not there slaving away so much.

17:18Rion Willard: So psychology here at play as well. And it's a broader societal thing as well. Like if I just to sort of go a little bit left field here, if I look at contemplative orders in churches or in catholicism for example or you know whatever kind of religion you want to look at contemplative orders have often been judged or deemed kind of irrelevant because they're perceived not to be doing anything and there's often a sort of societal pressure of like in the in that kind of context you need to be you need to be working hard you need to be doing something and I think at the very roots of our society and civilization that there is a strong messaging of like you've got to work hard you've got to put work ethic in so to be seen to not be doing anything a contemplative order those things quickly get pushed away or dismantled and so just for us we have this sort of perverse relationship with rest and rejuvenation as it's time off is not seen as productivity it's seen as something which is a waste or a luxury or a luxury sitting around would be a luxury would be laziness yes exactly and there's no it's not associated with productivity or or any sort of virtuousness or you know i mean i kind of like that about some bits of modern work ethic where there is perhaps some attention put onto people's well-being and that time off is actually quite an important aspect of it.

19:00I do think that the paradigm needs to shift around rest and rejuvenation is actually something which is hugely important to us being productive and delivering a high caliber of attention.

19:13Rion Willard: Well, this is where slowing down to speed up becomes important. And the beautiful part about this is you as a listener, you can test this out because you can look at your practice and you can say, okay, I'm working really hard. Maybe I've worked this hard or harder this many hours for years now. Are your results exponentially increasing in terms of the kind of projects you're getting, maybe the free time you're getting, the things that you care about or not, right? And so what we see in the marketplace, you can look at a lot of firms and there's not necessarily a direct correlation with how hard someone's working and how much freedom they have, how much time they have, how much impact they have.

19:53Rion Willard: But that is a major myth. We think that I have to work this certain amount of hours. I need to work this hard to be able to get the results. But reality shows that that's not true at all. And so if that's not true, what is? I think it's, and maybe later on in the conversation, when we'll make the distinction between power versus force. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm going to bring up a couple of the other sub problems here. So sub problem number two is that you may find that the harder you work, the more the business demands creating a cycle of exhaustion that produces effort without proportional reward.

20:29Rion Willard: We've talked about that. It can be very easy to get very busy around something that's not the main thing. So this is where keeping the main thing, the main thing is so critical. Number three, sub problem would be the busyness can feel like progress but it can mask the absence of a real system and so it becomes duct tape not design and we look at the impacts of the exhausted architect why working hard is making things worse i'm going to share a couple of quotes here these are these are real real sound bites from our recent workshop that we just ran down here in puerto rico where we had architects come from all over the U.S.

21:16Rion Willard: Monica said the following. We asked the question, how much you're working now? How many hours are you putting in your practice? We talked about the idea of a 40-hour work week. Monica said, if I worked 40 hours a week, it would feel like a vacation compared to what I have been working, the monster I created and what I'm used to. And there's another participant said, it's hard to tell how much I'm working because I feel like I bill way less than I actually end up mentally working. I'm probably working 50 to 60 probably. I'm working whenever I can fit it in. And then Ryan, you asked someone whether the 50 to 60 hour weeks were driven by passion or anxiety.

21:57Rion Willard: And the answer was anxiety. There's a difference. And I'm not sure it's always black and white. between when you're excited to work and you're filled with vitality and you love it versus you're anxious about the projects. And I think sometimes we justify anxiety with telling ourselves that we love what it is that we do, but we're not actually loving it anymore. It's a good distinction, passion versus anxiety. Yeah. And I think sometimes, like, I think, again, as you said all architects are passionate about architecture generally like they love it and we can abuse that passion we can abuse that as a conversation that we tell ourselves well I love it and I'm lucky to be doing architecture and it's all about design and it's such a noble craft that I'm participating in and you know architecture is so important for the rest of the world We can abuse that at our own expense to justify very unhealthy working habits, or it kind of softens the anxiousness that's really driving.

23:12Yeah, or we can use it to justify the anxiety. Exactly, exactly. And I think with so many practice owners that we see, it's been a long time of just grinding, grinding, grinding. And we find ourselves in this loop of the harder I work, the harder I have to work. Because I'm never solving anything. I'm never breaking any of the cycles. And often my hard work just is training people around you to become dependent on your hard work. Like other consultants, clients, your team, particularly your team. because you know the leaders of so many architect practices will work their asses off and never fully let go of responsibilities for their team to step into and that can be frustrating

24:05Rion Willard: for both parties yeah both parties yeah well there's you know there's also an embodied aspect of this as well which is one of the reasons why it makes it so difficult when for instance when we work with firms to install the smart practice method it's not just a checklist of items it's not just business processes. It's not just best practices for running a small firm. It is all that. However, there's an embodied experience. And what I mean by that is this has been my own experience because I hustled and grinded for years and years and years for some architecture and then building business of architecture.

24:39Rion Willard: So I know what it's like to get up at 4 a.m. and do that. And I remember going on vacations with family and I would be able to last maybe a day. Oftentimes I couldn't even go to one of my kids sports games without feeling anxiety rising in my body. Like there's something that needs to get done. That's not getting done. So what had happened is somehow I had trained my physical organism because our physical organisms, like a giant computer, we have the non-conscious brain, it recognizes patterns. And when those patterns happen repeatedly enough, then it just fires off automatically. And so what I found is that by being very stressed out, rushing around, always trying to get things done, I trained my body to be in that high pressure, high anxiety, high go, go, go kind of state.

25:25Rion Willard: And so then when I took myself out of that environment, whether it's going home from, you know, to home from work or whether I'm on vacation, I would still feel then I would start to feel anxious because my body's used to being under that pressure cooker. And so when it's not under that pressure cooker, it feels uncomfortable. And so then to feel more comfortable, it just, it's natural to get back in the pattern. So with the smart practice method, what we need to realize is that it's not just about coming in and giving you new tools and templates and all the best practices of 15 plus years of what we've acquired here at Business of Architecture, but it's also understanding that you as the leader are the cause of the transformation in your practice.

26:10Rion Willard: You, the leader, how you show up, how you operate, how you carry yourself throughout the day, how you lead, how you manage other people. this is what's going to determine the pace of the firm and the success of the firm. And interestingly, what my experience has been is that a lot of times, this isn't a hard and fast rule, but I've seen many firm owners who are very, very, very successful who operate the firm in a very unrushed manner. In other words, there's a freedom, there's an ease, there's a leisurely pace. there's just a grounded way that they conduct themselves instead of being hurried and frantic and reactive and the great thing is is there are tools and this is part of what we help firm owners achieve is we help them move from being that hurried reactive embodied they're basically conditioned to actually going through a deconditioning process to where now their body is is more accustomed to being in freedom and flow and when your body's in in freedom and flow then And it's not a struggle to be in freedom of flow.

27:14Rion Willard: That is now your default. I think it's interesting. This brings up an experience I had recently. I've been participating in this leadership training program and been exposed to a lot of very high caliber entrepreneurs and business people. And one of the guys there operates multiple businesses at eight, nine figures even, and is the sort of CEO, business owner of numerous organizations. And on the surface of it, it seems sort of insane that A, one person can be having that much, and yet my experience of this person was that they had the most amount of time available than anybody else who was on the program who had lesser quantity of perceived responsibilities.

28:13And it was really powerful just to see that in action of like, okay, wow, that's somebody who is, they are at the head of a lot of responsibilities and they have the most time available to participate in this program in a way because something's working well. There's a team, there's people, there's hierarchy, there's structure, there's prioritization that's been in place. And it's so interesting that so much of our own block is the very busyness itself and the attachment to the busyness and the status that perhaps busyness gets. Like you're saying that your body was physically anxious. Even this morning when we, you know, I took a nice nap this morning and didn't get up till quite late.

29:06I woke up and my initial sort of reaction was like, what have I done? I couldn't have done this. And I had to sort of like dysregulate my nervous systems. I know this is perfect. Like your body needed to rest. It needed to sleep. And so it's kind of, there is a sort of momentum of habit that we have to be productive and not wasting time. Yeah. And there is, again, I don't think it's necessarily that black and white because there is definitely, you know, to be very reverent of your time and also just recognize how we're kind of addicted to the busyness.

29:40Rion Willard: That's right. It goes back to the embodied thing, which is, this is where most time management courses, time management strategies, time blocking, prioritization, they all work and they're all important, but they're not going to work if you don't have the embodied experience to back them up. In other words, if you're not used to being in that flow, if you haven't trained your body to be able to be in a state of freedom and ease, as opposed to a state of reactivity and rushing. Now, there's impacts as well from being the exhausted architect. Some of them would be health related. It's not uncommon that we, and I've experienced this myself, when I don't have the time to work out, exercise, stress, continual stress causes unhealthy eating habits.

30:24Rion Willard: I know myself, when I'm stressed out, I'm more likely to get some ice cream. I'm more likely to get some sugar to start to... Get some ice cream. It's a date. Yeah. Yeah. We had some wonderful gelato the other day. So there is what can happen is that all of these things become a vicious cycle. So again, some of the impacts that we see as well with, I don't want to say overworking, but maybe not having good boundaries and not being in a state of freedom and flow, of being reactive, trying to get things done, doing the hustle and grind, it can impact relationships. A number one problem is the spousal relationship, your wife, your husband.

31:12Rion Willard: And we find it's not uncommon that it will indirectly impact the relationship because what's key for a healthy relationship is time together, communication. And when we're stressed out, we have the business on our mind. That limits our bandwidth to be able to show up for our partner. And so oftentimes people don't, we may not recognize, we may be blind to how everything's intertwined, that nothing, although we try to compartmentalize, nothing is truly compartmentalized. I know that when my wife and I aren't getting along or when something happens in my life, maybe a financial challenge or something with one of my children, my productivity goes down.

31:57Rion Willard: It's much harder to concentrate at work and focus on what I'm doing. I'm less motivated. I'm less motivated to take risks. I'm less motivated to be bold. I'm less motivated to do things that would put me outside of my comfort zone. That's so important to recognize. I know this as well, like in my relationship, my close relationship with Yvonne, that if something's not right there, then it can be the most disabling or unbalanced thing. And sometimes we see this as well, like when spousal relationships are not working, then there can be, particularly with men, there can be a tendency to then work harder.

32:38because if I at least if I'm working hard there's something working in the you know I can kind of throw myself into work as a sedative because it means I don't have to deal with the home situation that's not working but yet the harder work in the work in the job now makes the home situation even worse I know from my own personal experience yeah if there's like an argument or something that's happened that's not been resolved then that can be really disorientating or disabling with productivity and just work anyway. Whereas with the opposite is true when there's been a lot of love and connection and intimacy and you just feel so supported in a relationship that you show up 200 times better at work.

33:22You show up and have a higher threshold for making high caliber decisions and being more present and connected. So these are not discrete elements of life. No.

33:35Rion Willard: And another invisible cost here that no one I've not really heard anyone talk about is oftentimes we'll work because we want to avoid home life. In other words, oftentimes overworking, staying at the office can sometimes give us the reward that we're not getting at home through respect, through connection. And so I know that this is, I've done this in the past when my wife and I aren't getting along. I'll work longer hours and I'll justify it. I mean like, great, I want to get stuff done. But in the back of my head, when I'm really honest with myself, like, you know what? I'd rather be here than at home right now.

34:12Yeah.

34:13Rion Willard: And there are people, I know there's people listening here, maybe you, who this is, this has been happening for years and years and years. This is your pattern and you know, it's true and you're not sure how to get out of it because you don't know how to fix the relationship. You don't know how to get it to where it's, you'd like it to be. And so work can become a form of sedation as well. A way of hiding, a way of escaping responsibility, a way of escaping deeper connection with the people we love. And on the flip side, when we do have, as you mentioned, we do have a very solid, supportive, romantic partnership relationship at home.

34:53Rion Willard: That is like a fire that gives us energy to show up as our best selves. Yeah. Most confident. Yeah. Right. When we're arguing at home or when we're disconnected from our spouse, that also saps our confidence. Right. I know if I just, if I had had an argument with my wife or a disagreement, then for me in the past, I might have feelings of unworthiness or I'm not enough, or why can't I get this marriage thing figured out? And then of course the next day I'm less confident because as I'm going into things, I'm thinking I'm a fraud. I can't figure out my own marriage. Why do I still get triggered by that thing?

35:26Rion Willard: Why does that still annoy me? I'm a terrible leader. and when we're walking around with these negative stories, it's draining. It's draining. It impacts our results negatively. We can't show up to be our best self. And so we can look at, oftentimes we may look at overworking as maybe a problem. You're working too long, but what if we flip it on? What if we say it's not a problem? What we say is, what if it's a symptom? And what's actually the root cause of this overworking? Because passion is definitely, passion's not a liability. Passion's an asset. So the question is about, should I follow my passion?

36:04Rion Willard: It's about how do we take the passion that you have as a firm owner and how do you channel all of that energy? How do you channel that power that you have? How do you transmit that? How do you transmute that into more energy, into more fulfillment, into good results? And if you don't have the systems to support you, it's going to be really, really hard. So that's why this, but it's both the systems, why in smart practice method, there's four pillars. One of them is power. One of them is process. They sit right at the top. And the reason why these, the power is all about your internal being, how you operate, how you, how you hold your energy, how you show up, your leadership skills, your internal discipline.

36:43Rion Willard: And then of course the processes would be the structures that are set up to support you to be the best version of you in your leadership capacity. And this can happen anywhere from a sole practitioner can have structure and power, can have the process and the power, or it could be a firm of 150 people. So one of the, also the myths that we need to deconstruct here is the idea that, and it's so embedded, the idea that working hard is just the way it is, that we just need to work hard, that this is what it takes to build the design firm. It's not. As a matter of fact, you having that story is actually the very thing that's preventing you from having freedom and liberation and flexibility and flow as a design firm owner, which is kind of a head buster because we think I can't get there.

37:31Rion Willard: And the reason you think that this is that you can't get there, the reason you can't get there is because you think you can't get there because this is just status quo. We have a saying that I think I probably picked up from an investment, some property investor, I believe. The saying is, we work hard in order to not to have to work hard. And in architecture, we end up just working hard and it perpetuates hard work. And there is hard work involved in a business, but it's not the status quo. And it's not the thing that happens all the time. and actually like a functioning well-run business should not be constant constant hard work yeah and there's a right there's also let's a differentiation there too between what makes the work hard yeah right because you can have an hour let's say you have an hour block of time and it could be considered hard it could be considered easy but you still still spend an hour doing it it could be energetically draining where you want to take a nap you want to sit down You want to eat some ice cream or some frozen yogurt or something to get your blood sugar back up.

38:35Rion Willard: Or it could be energizing. Right. So what does it look like when your days are more filled with things that are energizing? And although you're getting a lot done, it feels effortless and it feels more like you're in a flow state. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Yeah. So that's exactly what the smart practice method is about, is about taking both of these things, both the structure and, So we call the structure, we'll call that the processes and the actual power of the psychological underpinnings behind that. So I'm just going to mention the possibilities here. We mentioned some of the problems, some of the sub-problems.

39:13Rion Willard: Here's the possibility number one. You work 40 focused hours per week and it generally feels like a vacation compared to where you are now. Number two, your weekends are yours. no laptop no guilt spiral no just one more thing before i close again we talk about working hard we talk about the impacts and the mental friction that accompanies all of this the mental friction that accompanies relationships not working just imagine that not being there and you're free and present it's being completely free and present that's amazing yeah and one of the nice things about, I know that firm owners sometimes reminisce about is the difference between being an employee and a firm owner.

40:00Rion Willard: When you're a firm owner, typically you're going to go home ruminating on the business, thinking about it. As an employee, typically you're going to clock in, clock out. When you clock out, you're off. You're done. You're present with whatever's ahead of you. Now you may think about different business tasks occasionally, but for the most part, you're not worrying about it. Whereas a firm owner is, a firm owner is literally having dreams about it where they're waking up in the middle of the night thinking about something. And a good firm owner, they stress out their employees so that employees go home and think about their work.

40:31Exactly.

40:31Rion Willard: Because we want everyone to be very stressed out and very concerned about always thinking about the work and getting everything done. Possibility number three is that your firm has systems and structure. and it depends on those, it's founded on those, not your nervous system or your personal willpower. And possibility number four is you lead from clarity and energy, not exhaustion and fear, and the work is better for it. So there's a few mindset shifts that need to happen to move from being the exhausted architect to being the architect who's living in freedom and flow, who's utilizing that passion in a powerful way.

41:12Rion Willard: And principle number one is, we've talked about this previously in this very episode, is conquering and destroying the myth that working harder equals more success. It inequivocably does, unequivocally does not. exactly and you know this the paradigm shift about what rest is and that rest is fuel rest is a form of productivity we look at the high performance sports people they take recovery extraordinarily seriously um you know just being able to let your body rest monitoring it it doesn't work i remember when i used to train muay thai and same sort of thing you'd get into the habit of like you just want to train all the time you're getting addicted to it the adrenaline that you don't want to take a day off you don't want your your abilities to sort of drop and then you don't recover and then and then you keep on training you never get out of that sort of energetic energetic dip and you're afraid that if you take time off then it's not going to be you know you'll lose your sharpness or whatever it is and again just shifting that mindset into that rest is actually one of the most powerful things that we can do and exploring how we can rest and rejuvenate guilt-free.

42:32Because it's also like, it's funny because when we can take, we can rest. And then if we're guilty about it or anxious about it, we haven't really rested.

42:41Rion Willard: Yeah, and there's definitely a culture of guilt around rest. That's very important to call out. So, and it can impact your team members as well, because as a firm owner, if you're taking time for proper self-care and proper rest, it's not completely unlikely that your team members may be thinking in their mind, why does, why does she go to yoga every morning at 10 a.m.? I mean, that's, you know, I'm, I'm sitting here slaving away behind the computer while the firm owner's taking this 90 minute break in the morning. Yeah, absolutely. So there's a cultural aspect of this as well as helping shift our team members to understand that they, they get to wretch and rejuvenate and helping them understand and respect the rest and rejuvenation that we're taking.

43:22Rion Willard: And also recognizing that every single person has a different energetic makeup. So some people, myself, you know, I need a lot of sleep, a lot of rest. It benefits me greatly to be very well rested. Other people, Ryan used to be more of like an energizer bunny. Ryan can go all day long from the time he wakes up, a nice lunch and go into the late evening. And yes, physical exhaustion does happen, but your energy stores, it doesn't seem like your quality of output decreases as dramatically as mine would. If I'm pushing myself past the point where I feel well rested, the quality of my, of my output is terrible.

44:01Rion Willard: I'm falling asleep. I can't think, I can't think properly. So it's also, so at the very highest levels of leadership, when we're looking at putting people in the right roles in the right places, it's also important to understand how people's energetic. makeup works and being able to take that into account. I think that's really important for you, for everyone to do a little bit of self-exploration with that, because I used to really feel bad about, I'm a night owl, you know this, I wake up around 10 o 'clock and my wife is the same, we're both like, and we're up at 2, 3 in the morning and we're kind of, we're just awake.

44:41and I used to really try and force myself into getting up very early and now much more relaxed with being able to get up at eight o 'clock or half past seven or at the weekends ten and it's not it's not a problem um so I do think and there was a thing called um chronotypes and there's a I can't remember the name of the guy but there's a guy a sort of sleep scientist there's a lot of research done on that and when I came across some of that information about chronotypes that you know some people are naturally the early birds some people are even neutral they can get up at any time and then there are the sort of night owls that that's that's a evolutionary thing that exists in human beings and it had a purpose when we always to live around a campfire where you can't have everybody getting up at the same time because then that means we need people awake you know when there's you know when there's vulnerability happening um that was very reassuring to to start to explore my own energetic cycles during the day.

45:43And it's a bit of an exploration and worthwhile people kind of experimenting, but not to kind of just burden yourself with loads of extra guilt if you're not part of the 5 a.m.

45:57Rion Willard: club. Absolutely. And it's very easy to get into that with a lot of the entrepreneurial teachings now. If you're watching YouTube, listening to podcasts, if you read David Goggin's book or listen to any of his content. He'll just be like, get up early. 4 a.m., I'm up. If you don't work hard, you can't play hard. Yeah. And that's great for some people, but it's good to recognize it doesn't work for everyone. Recently I was away for a weekend, and part of the weekend we did not use our phones. What? I've done this on retreats before in monasteries where we give our phones away to people. Shocking.

46:36And during this weekend retreat, we all let go of our phones. And there was no electronic stimulus. There was no TV. There was anything like that. And it was a really wonderful thing to just allow your body to get synced up with daylight and then to wake up naturally. And then when you wake up, you're not immediately grabbing for the phone. And you just kind of got to... It was like the 90s, basically. I was like, or the 80s or the 70s or the 60s.

47:09Rion Willard: That sounds very, very refreshing. So another mindset here that we need to reframe is the following. If I slow down, everything will fall apart. Consider that the reason why everything feels like it's being held together with shoestrings and duct tape is because you're not slowing down. That's actually not the cure. That's actually the cause. This is really interesting because I find with our own clients, one of the biggest challenges that they go through is just slowing down and taking some time out to think about their business. hence we're in puerto rico right now because we're literally forcing people to break out of their automatic everyday routines and habits and come somewhere where the pace of life is perhaps a little bit more leisurely and look from afar at your business and it's very difficult for people to do that and there is this anxiety that accompanies slowing down particularly with architecture and it's kind of driven by a scarcity an addiction to a scarce mindset of like we haven't got enough money we haven't got enough time we've got the clients need everything go go go go and just giving yourself the luxury of being able it's not even a luxury that it's essential actually and giving yourself the time to slow down actually will save you way more time than you could ever possibly imagine in the long term.

48:43Rion Willard: Agreed. Agreed. Because the quality of output of your work and of your thought and of your thinking is going to be so much higher when you're well rested, when you're not scrambling, when you're not responding, when you're not. This is one of the challenges of having this never ending to-do list is that you then become a slave to the to-do list, become a victim of your inbox. You're now just doing the next thing on your checklist as opposed to stepping back and thinking, is this the most important thing that I'm doing right now that I should be doing? Oftentimes it's driven by urgency and not importance, which becomes a vicious cycle.

49:21I think that's really important. Here is the priority. Prioritizing gives you the ability to slow down.

49:30Rion Willard: Yeah. And understanding how to think about priorities and what are the priorities. Oftentimes one of the reasons why it's hard to determine what the priorities are is perhaps you haven't been trained on what should be the priorities. This is one of the challenges of running a design practice in a silo is without peer access to other people who are successful, without having mentors or coaches, how do you know that the priority you're focused on is going to be the one that's going to deliver the best result? So we have a path here for you to get out of exhaustion into freedom, to get out of forcing into flow.

50:10Rion Willard: And these are the four R's. We call it your recovery framework. Number one is recognize. Number two is restructure. Number three is reclaim. And number four is rest. So we'll start out with the first one, which is recognize. The first thing to do is to actually recognize and name what's actually driving all the overworking. Get to the root cause. What's the root cause that's causing me to be reactive? what concerns, what fears, what anxiety, what lack of organization, what's running my internal operating system that's causing me to overwork and to always feel like I can't catch up? Is it perfectionism?

50:53Rion Willard: Is it the absence of systems? Is it because you don't know the solution to it, and so you just sweep it under the rug? What's the root cause? and then that one we can go very deep with the recognize and it's and this can be a lifetime practice of starting to become ever more self-aware of the underlying perhaps sometimes hidden conversations that are actually producing the symptoms of anxiety and perfectionism and And I would often say that a lack of self-esteem is often a real root cause here. Now when you say self-esteem, what do you mean? I mean... A lot of different ways to define that. At its core, love.

51:47like actually being able to fill yourself up with a sense of being complete being perfect being whole being exactly perfect the way you are and the way you're not acknowledging yourself giving gratitude and thanks for you and your life and for being the way that you are fully immersing yourself in deep trust that the things that you say and do are the perfect things to say and do, even if they do not produce the results and outcomes that you preferred. And there's a somewhat of a surrendering process. And again, this can be very deep. And a lot of these symptoms of overwork come from a lack of self-love.

52:41Rion Willard: Well said, well said. And it's not uncommon for someone on their entrepreneurial journey. So the stages that I've seen are typically there's, and if psychological literature talks about this as well, there's the process where you're building your life, you're hustling, you're grinding. A lot of that is driven by, at least in my own life I can find and I see it in the lives of others, is driven by the validation that we get from our wins, from being successful. So there's an element of wanting to work, wanting to succeed because we're trying to satiate or fill some part of our being, some part of our mind, some part of our psyche that feels inadequate, that feels we don't measure up, that feels we're not good enough, that feels we're not worthy, that feels we don't have the value.

53:26Rion Willard: And so when you heal that, when you release that, when you surrender that need to get that validation through love, like Ryan was talking about, then what ends up happening is now you can start to create from passion and from purpose instead of completely from problems and persistence. And this is very deep, the whole conversation that we're having here about exhaustion, you know, and working overly hard when you're coming from a sense of lack or I'm not good enough or I'm not worthy or I'll show you or any of that. That has an energetic cap on it versus when we're coming from, I'm working because it's an expression of my love for the world.

54:13It's an expression of my own love for me. It's an expression of my love for humanity. This is like, you know, in Buddhist literature, it's just kind of like an immeasurable, like the human capacity to be able to cultivate love and to share it. And this is when we start seeing vitality. Like we can produce and be energetic and it's coming from source as opposed to I'm trying to fix something. Trying to power through, trying to just get it done. Exactly.

54:45Rion Willard: Spinning all the plates. Yes. climbing all the ladders on the treadmill I mean a good example of this is the doing the all nighter because we're fearful that we haven't done something and that we're going to get in trouble or we're going to be judged you know like the all nighter before the crit like we're facing some sort of judgment as opposed to trusting that you can handle that conversation and trusting that you can produce what's needed to produce and that you're aligned with whatever the client's what the result is that you've given your word to producing with them, which is independent often from a list of things that you have to do.

55:29Rion Willard: Yeah, it's almost like entering an element of play into it, right? Absolutely. And I'll relate this to a story that I had. I'm not a very good golfer, but I'll bring a golf analogy in here. Ryan is much more proficient at golf, but it was my birthday a few years back. I was actually at an architectural conference with Jeff Hoover, who's our director of strategic partnerships. He's a great golfer. So we're on this little scramble team, and I'm the worst person on the team. Just terrible. But I was able to bring just, I'm just there. I'm not there to win the game. I'm not there to compete. I'm there to have fun and play.

56:05Rion Willard: And when I shifted into that playfulness of doing it to have fun and to play, I found that I was more successful than if I was like, you know, gritting my teeth. trying to be the best golf player, hit it down the fairway, like, you know, just having a more relaxed, unattached approach to it ended up producing better results. Yeah, absolutely. So sometimes we're white-knuckling. We're just white-knuckling through life. We're white-knuckling through business, and it's counterintuitive. So let's recognize. Number two is to restructure. What we mean by that is to redesign your weekly rhythm around protected time blocks and intentional priorities, not just whoever's screaming the loudest.

56:49Rion Willard: So this is why a planning rhythm is so valuable and so important. And in smart practice, what we found over the years is that instead of following a more corporate model for planning, where you, for instance, the EOS system, they follow the typical corporate planning methodology where you have yearly planning, you break that down into quarterly plans and quarterly priorities and your rocks on the weekly basis, everything like that. What we found is for small practices that are more agile, that don't have a big corporate team, we recommend monthly planning sessions to celebrate the wins of the past month and to set the priorities for the following month.

57:30Rion Willard: So instead of having these four times a year where you're doing this big planning and trying to establishing all these priorities. The problem with that that we found, like in real world application, is that things get undone until the last month. You discover you're behind. There's no way you're going to catch up. And so you hurry to try to get that objective done. And then you enter into the next quarter with a lot of your objectives incomplete. And that cycle repeats again and again and again. So as a firm, you may be one of four different places with your planning methodology. You may have complete chaos, no planning at all.

58:10Rion Willard: There's no planning happening. There's no annual plan. There's no monthly plan. Maybe you sit down with a notepad every week and you're planning out just your to-do list and that's the extent of your planning. That is no planning at all, which is probably the way that a lot of us were taught how to operate or maybe not taught how to operate. The second way would be you do have some planning methodology. Maybe you're actually setting aside some time every week to, again, go through your projects. Maybe you're meeting with your team members on a weekly basis. But again, it's much more ad hoc. It's much more reactive.

58:44Rion Willard: So you actually do have some sort of planning methodology. The next thing we could say would be a level three, which is you're following the corporate model where you're doing the annual plan. You're doing the quarterly plans, but it's perhaps not very well implemented, not followed very well. And then at the top, let's say the best attribute would be you have a very strong structure that you follow for planning, a planning rhythm, and it's on a monthly basis. It's more easily adjusted than something where you're locking in your priorities for three months. So that's what we mean when we're talking about restructure, is having some sort of structures to support you.

59:24Rion Willard: You have protected time blocks. You're identifying your priorities. And you're not just working on the things that need to happen now, but actually this whole idea of working on the business. Right? Not just in the business. So number three, reclaim. And this is really about identifying the 20 % of your work that drives 80 % of your results. and learning to protect it the same way that you might do with your highest value client meetings. And again, this kind of goes back to the story that I was recounting the other day. I mean, earlier in this podcast of our client who they had just arbitrarily decided that they needed 24 hours to do all of this work.

1:00:08And upon a little bit of examination, recognized that actually there was a clear intention that the meeting was meant to fulfill on. and a result that the client wanted and needed in order to make their decisions to progress to the next stage of the project that did not require 25 different drawings and layout options. In fact, it needed far less. It needed the architect to be the lead and to be able to be the facilitator of the conversation with a few thoughtful sketches to prompt the decision for the client. and that became a much more simple and effective process to manage that did not require the 24 hours.

1:00:52And for our particular client, it was enormously freeing and they could go in and they could enjoy the process and they had more time available to do something else, maybe rest. Otherwise, I think we've all had this experience of you just produce loads and loads of work and loads and loads of options and then you don't look at half of it. There was only one or two drawings that were actually spoken about in the meeting. I remember at university having this experience when we first did some teamwork and obviously university doesn't often have a lot of team projects and there was an experience where the other people in my team, they wanted to spend all night working and doing lots of drawings and I was a little bit more confident in the sense that I thought we had enough drawings and perhaps probably again this sorts of I think this leans into personality types as well somebody who's more confident with communicating you know that you can communicate and navigate through to a result as opposed to needing to have all of the drawn documentation to produce the results so there's a balance there as well between personality types and just analyzing what's the most effective thing hence why i do you know here at smart practice we do put a massive emphasis on communication with your clients communicate because you're a lot of these meetings you're driving and facilitating a conversation which is going to end up in a decision or a result so do you need to have every single option worked out to the end detail or what is the minimum amount that you need in order to facilitate the conversation.

1:02:36Rion Willard: Exactly. There's a planning methodology called the ABCDE planning method. And the way that it works is to prioritize. A means these are your A priorities. B, these are your B priorities. A is absolutely important. It needs to get done. B probably should get done. C, it could wait. You move over to D, this is where these are the things that get delegated so they get off your plate. And the most important part about this whole entire planning method is E, which is to eliminate. So the truth is there's probably a lot of things on your to-do list that could be completely eliminated that don't need to get done.

1:03:11Rion Willard: They're nice to have, they can be put on the back burner, they don't need to be done. Ryan, that's what came up when you were talking for me when you were talking about this architect. It sounded like they were able to eliminate a large part of what they thought they were supposed to do and saved enormous amounts of time. Absolutely, absolutely. And then the final R in the recovery framework is rest. And we've mentioned rest numerous times in today's conversation. But really, you're building a genuine recovery into your practice, not just as a reward for heroic work, but rather as a form of productivity that fuels the whole practice and fuels your whole sense of productivity and being able to get things done.

1:03:56So actually revering rest, protecting it, considering it as being one of your highest value activities and scheduling and planning for it.

1:04:08Rion Willard: Yeah. And putting that in at the beginning. So when you're planning out your week, putting that in first. So those get blocked out your family vacations, your individual rest time, your meditation hours, the time when you're going to go to the gym, the time when you're going to go watch the sunrise with your cup of coffee or tea, making sure that the rest is calendared. And it becomes, it becomes part of, it becomes not, not so much a rest or an escape from work, but it becomes part of your productivity just as important, perhaps even more crucial than the work itself. And here's today's smart practice tool tip.

1:04:42Rion Willard: You ever wanted to stop being the bottleneck in your firm? Well, now is your chance. Stop hiring seat fillers and start building a team of self-managed pros because they're worth it. One of the common mistakes that we see young firm owners, even experienced firm owners making, is thinking that you're going to save money by hiring cheap. It never works out. So to help you hire people that actually fit the roles you have in your practice, we prepared the Rockstar Hiring guide. That's right. It shows you exactly how to find, evaluate, and onboard the right employees for your firm who actually drive results so you can focus on being a visionary and an architect instead of a hamster on the wheel.

1:05:24Rion Willard: Grab yours free by going to businessofarchitecture.com forward slash rockstar. A while ago, we began to hear reports of a company that was helping some of our clients build remote teams. We looked into it more closely and discovered the company World Teams that was helping small architectural practitioners build remote teams that were both capable and qualified. We were intrigued by another business that are addressing one of the critical pain points for small architectural practices, which is the ability to grow and shrink a team effectively, to be able to handle higher workflow without having to staff up significantly, and also being very sensitive about labor costs.

1:06:00Rion Willard: World Teams is built to address these issues. World Teams is a small but mighty company that helps architectural practices build high-performing remote teams quickly, beneficently, saving you the headache of sorting resumes and interviewing underqualified candidates. World Teams operates in your time zone and prioritizes near-native English speakers, ensuring clear and efficient communication with your remote team members. They have flexible contracts, so you can adjust your team size as your needs evolve. Additionally, you're connected directly with your skilled professionals, which fosters trust and collaboration, and World Teams helps you reduce your operating cost without compromising the quality that's so important to a practice.

1:06:41Rion Willard: To download a free guide for building a remote team for a small architectural practice, go to businessofarchitecture.com forward slash world teams. That's one word, businessofarchitecture.com forward slash world teams. As a reminder, sponsorship is not an endorsement, and you must do your own due diligence before entering into any business relationship. Go to businessofarchitecture.com forward slash world teams. And today's episode of the Business of Architecture show is also sponsored by Smart Practice, the world's leading step-by-step solution for practice owners that want to structure their existing practice so the complexity of business doesn't get in the way of the architecture.

1:07:21Rion Willard: Because you see, the firm owners who win, they aren't the ones chasing the next free tip. They're the ones who get advice tailored to them, and that's why they're able to move faster, avoid mistakes, and hit their goals. So if you're ready to quit being a glorified administrator and get back to architecture again, go to smartpracticemethod.com and discover the proven, simple, and easy-to-implement smart practice method that's revolutionizing firm management for owners and teams. I'm Enix Sears and I want to thank you for joining me here today And remind you that the views expressed on this show by our guest Do not represent those of the host And we make no representation, promise, guarantee, pledge Warranty contract, bond, or commitment Except to help you do your best work And be handsomely paid for it Carpe Diem