There are lots of things about your work that feel completely ordinary. The question every client asks on the first call that you answer the same way without even thinking. The way that project stages really work for a residential client, and the realities of budget that the TV restoration programmes never prepare them for. The window detail you’ve drawn a hundred times.
Those things are so very ordinary, you don’t even register them as requiring your specialist expertise.
You spend years studying and practising to make drawing that window detail easy and effortless. Hard-earned skills stop feeling like an achievement at some point: they’re just how you work. You don’t remember what it’s like not to know the answer to that first call question, so it stops looking like an answer. It just looks like a fact.
There are also things that can feel really difficult. Knowing what to write on your frequently asked questions page, or, frankly, any of your website. Posting something interesting on social media that will interest your audience. Knuckling down to draw that window detail for the hundred-and-first time.
There is a surprising amount of overlap on the two lists. And the solutions to the difficult jobs can often be found in those ordinary, everyday tasks.
When you’re redoing a lot of the same work every day, drawing the same detail, or answering the same questions to new clients, you’re taking time away from the new work you should be doing, the new and specific questions you need to properly consider in order to answer. If you could write down those repetitive answers and save them for later, you could reuse them.
And your marketing takes up so much more time than it needs to, because you don’t realise that all those little everyday discoveries and triumphs and challenges are what make up the interesting content that your audience really, genuinely wants to know. What have you been up to recently? Is there a staircase that proved to be an unusual challenge and needed you to flex your architectural muscles? Or was the very ordinariness of your week pointing to a pattern of work that your clients wouldn’t know about, but might interest them a great deal?
The answers were never hidden or secret. Nobody was concealing the social media posts or the FAQ or stashing the templates where you couldn’t find them. You just needed to recognise that the answers you were seeking could be found in your ordinary working day. The work has already been done. All that’s missing is knowing it’s there to be used.