{"id":779172,"date":"2025-03-17T16:07:59","date_gmt":"2025-03-17T16:07:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.architectsjournal.co.uk\/?p=779172"},"modified":"2025-03-17T16:07:59","modified_gmt":"2025-03-17T16:07:59","slug":"exactly-what-did-you-accomplish-last-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.architectsjournal.co.uk\/news\/opinion\/exactly-what-did-you-accomplish-last-week","title":{"rendered":"Exactly what did you accomplish last week?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018What did you accomplish last week?\u2019 is an anxiety-inducing question that nine times out of 10 would cause me to break out in a sweat. US federal employees received this exact email<\/a> from Elon Musk\u2019s new government outfit, the Department of Government Efficiency \u2013 DOGE \u2013 saying that a response was directly linked to their future employment. Could you easily answer such an email?<\/p>\n

Six months ago, I might have struggled to answer. But recently our practice has been pushing for a more \u2018metric-driven\u2019 way to practise (involving timesheets and project tracking). This isn\u2019t revolutionary and reflects a general move by architects \u2013 encouraged by the wider industry \u2013 to build deep databases of metrics about our designs for buildings and how those buildings perform over their lifetimes, part of a wider effort to help transform the built environment and measure progress.<\/p>\n

But could it be that we are missing out on the data relating to how <\/em>we complete projects? Time and money are standard metrics, but what else could you track within your business to help improve it?<\/p>\n

We now live in an era where data is a new currency. Increasingly, companies offer users the ability to collect and self-track their own metrics, particularly through the boom in health apps. I\u2019m not immune to this myself, having tracked sleep, calories and blood glucose, all in an effort to find correlations and make marginal gains in mundane things such as sleep quality and avoiding the afternoon crash. I\u2019m now starting to wonder whether the same thinking could be applied to the much more significant and demanding part of my life: architecture.<\/p>\n

When I brought this up recently with friends, we ended up naming a number of tracking metrics beyond billable hours. Here are some of our favourites:<\/p>\n