When Matt typed the last words of his coordination report, it was the tenth one he’d sent the client. His timesheet told him he had spent 86 hours on model coordination alone. Every Friday, the number climbed higher. Each time a new model arrived, he had to compare it against ours to make sure nothing critical had changed. He was in charge of signing off the models and the drawings and if he missed something, there would be consequences.
At first, it was fine. It was even fun, a break from the more stressful parts of the job. But after the third time, with over 50 floors to compare each time, coordination became a chore. It was the same old boring routine each time. "Matt, here's a new model, I only changed the 36th floor", the client says. But when Matt checks, he finds a column removed on the 20th floor. To which, the client responds with "I am not sure how that got in there" the client replies. It's the same dance every week.
Eventually, Matt had enough. He reached out to me, hoping I could help. I told him I could write a script that would highlight the differences between two models. It wouldn’t tell him who was responsible for the changes, but it would make spotting them easier.
And so I did. I put my head down for about a week or two and built him a new workflow. Working with Revit is never straightforward especially with external models too. But when I taught Matt how to use it, the tool changed everything. Matt went from spending hours on manual checks to 30 minutes running the script, scanning the results, and writing the report.
He used that tool again and again, at least ten more times before the project ended. The best part was that my time was billed to the client. So it ended up a win-win.
The other side
For every hour I spend on a project, there’s also time spent building tools that aren’t tied to any single project. Tools that fix repeating problems across the company.
A few months ago, Emily from finance got in touch. She’d heard from Matt that I was a “wizard in Excel” and wondered if I could help. Our company had landed a few big infrastructure jobs, which meant more complicated invoicing.
Emily was manually compiling everyone's timesheets, separating billable from non-billable hours, applying the right rates based on their position, and preparing the final invoice. She did this every two weeks in Excel and it took her a full day to do it.
Because these projects went for so long, there were staff members that got promoted or have left the company. Their rates changed over the course of the project. Emily had to keep track of it all, manually updating her spreadsheet each time.
So, we sat together for a few days and I helped her build a better Excel system that pulled the timesheets, calculated totals, and adjusted for changing rates automatically. The new system turned her invoicing process which used to take one full day into a one hour ordeal. All she had to do now was click a few buttons to pull the data and prepare the final table.
It was real value but not billable to any single project.
To be or not to be ... billable
So, I always have a choice to make with my time. I can either spend it on a project and be directly billable (the clients pay for the time) or I can spend it on a wide spread problem which is non-billable (the company pays for the time). Both produce a lot of value. One helps a project. The other helps the business.
It's a tension that most (dare I say all) companies haven't solved, especially when it comes to computational design. It's value is hard to predict and harder to measure, which makes forecasting (a beloved corporate term) harder. Some firms put computational designers into project teams to be "fully" billable. Others keep them in R&D teams. Some try to have it both ways, but billable work usually wins. Money is a strong motivator.
I think that’s the wrong way to frame it. Being billable or not is not a problem to solve. It’s a paradox to manage. I don’t think we can fully squash the notion of being billable.
Too much time in R&D and you might spend millions on something no one uses. But zero R&D and you risk falling behind, especially with how fast things are changing with AI.
That tension between billable and non-billable never fully goes away. And that’s a good thing. It keeps us sharp and relevant. Project work helps the business now. Internal tools helps the business over time. Neglect either one and you miss delivering real value.
And from what I have seen. Prototypes or ideas made during projects are the best kind because they solve real problems that people face.
A gray area with high value
Computational design suffers from this more than others because we can do both. We can contribute directly to projects and build broad tools that help the business.
That in-between space creates uncertainty and challenges people's assumptions about what's actually valuable. When that happens, there is a tendency to just revert to the defaults, which is money or billable hours.
We think the goal is to choose between billable or non-billable but the trick is to hold both at once. To welcome that tension and work with it, instead of seeing it as a problem.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time...” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
But if we are manage billable and non-billable at the same time, how then do we know what to work on? How do we assess if we have been doing well ?
Optimizing for value and interest
Value and interest is my guiding principle for helping me navigate this tension. Instead of focusing on how billable or non-billable I am, I try to focus on the value a project/tool can bring to people. If I'm clear on that, I’m sure that it's the right next move.
For any project work, I ask myself:
Is this the best use of my time right now ?
Is this project really important to the company ?
By joining it, am I making this project worse or better ?
For any internal work, I ask myself
Will this tool actually get used ?
Is this actually a repeatable problem ? Or did someone get burned by a one-off project
Is it worth making this tool right now ? Can it wait ? Is there something else more urgent ?
The questions are generic but they help me pause and assess if what I am doing now is the best use of my time regardless of how billable I am.
I am not saying to ignore the cost of things, we should always have that in the back of our minds. But instead of focusing on it or using it as our performance metric, we should focus on delivering value instead.
The tension between billable and non-billable will never go away and it shouldn’t. Like deadlines, no one likes it but it helps keep us on track and relevant.
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