Day 14: Friday 27 January
Fridays are seldom the most productive day, especially a Friday after a pubic holiday.
The trick for me is to keep working on something constructive, if not important. Being creative, learning or just getting ideas and copy written down.
Just keep going and avoid voids in the day.
To be fair the day was a pretty productive one. It may not have been filled with aha’s or huge frogs, but there was enough in it to deny the initial aprehension.
A slooow start.
Probably spent a little too long programming my media posts for next week, but the value was that they helped refine my thinking and more importantly my copy. It meant that I updated some of the copy on my website – which is a constant work in progress. I also recognise that I’m not putting in CTA’s and talking about what I do enough. Trying to incorporate that thinking a little more.
I’m also working on my metaphors and analogies. Using this as a placeholder, here’s one that I I came up with, it can be refined and it’s a good start.
For many architects detailing is everything. It can make or break a project.
It’s valuable to consider your practice in the same way. The best way to elevate your practice is to work on your human skills, your leadership, communication, listening, feedback, and so on. They’re the detailing of architectural practice.
“The way you do one thing, is the way you do everything.” – Will Guidara
That’s what I do. I run workshops for practices and coach architects on the detailing of practice. Building a better relationships with your people, work and practice through developing your human skills and the “way you do everything”.
Book in a free chat and subscribe to my email useletter. It’s useful and all about your future not my past.
Links in the comments.
[social media post]
What is it for?
Working through how I would construct the Tolstoy video introduction for my website, I dwelt on that question.
Also, what it’s not for.
It wasn’t to bore people with details of what I do and how I do it.
It’s to introduce myself and unmeasured. To engage them with something that wasn’t as dry as text. It’s to tell a story about what I do and it doesn’t need to be literal. It’s nice if they can be my stories but they can be also other people’s stories, in my words, to beautifully illustrate how I see the world of my work and that f unmeasured.
It allows me some liberty, some freedom and allows me to escape the earnest and didactic presentations I can fall into.
The website then becomes for…
gap filling. Being informative and filling in the detail. Hopefully still not didactic and earnest but it can afford to be more forgivably so.
I can see my website is light on for some of this info. It can afford to be more upfront about the pain of my clients I’m here to solve and how they’ll be changed by my services. More storytelling and more informatively so.
A good list…
…of stories for each video has been assembled. I’ve identified the stories that probably best suit each one too. Next step is to map out a structure – as apposed to script – based on Bernadette Jiwa’s principles.
Weekly Review
Irrespective of the day lost to a public holiday, it was not the best week.
There’s a few half-eaten frogs.
I’m left with a sense of mis-prioritising. That’s identifying work as Important that was perhaps more on the Valuable side of my Task Central kanban board.
The priority should be selling, marketing the work, getting clients. These things I’ve been doing are valuable, but they ultimately don’t pay. Clients pay. Products pay.
That’s where I must put my focus next week.
