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Time tracking for architects: how long a drawing set really takes

· 7 min read

Architects usually know what a project was worth and only roughly what it cost in hours. The gap shows up in the next fee proposal, which gets built from the last one rather than from what the work took. You can close it without timers: keep a record of where your Mac time goes during a project, note which phase and project each day was about, and at the end divide the hours by what you produced. Hours per phase and hours per sheet are the numbers that make the next fee honest.

Why architects’ hours are hard to recall

Architecture work does not arrive in tidy blocks. A morning in the model turns into an hour of redlines, a consultant call, a code check, and a revision to a detail you thought was finished. Across a long project the phases overlap, and construction documents in particular stretch in a way that is hard to feel from inside them.

Timers fail here for a familiar reason: they depend on you starting and switching them, and nobody remembers to, twenty times a day, between a model, a drawing set and email. Most small offices end up reconstructing timesheets on Friday afternoon from memory, which rounds everything and misses the evening sessions entirely. Filling in a weekly timesheet when you cannot remember Tuesday covers that problem in general.

What to measure

Three numbers are enough for most sole practitioners and small practices:

  • Hours per phase. Schematic design, design development, construction documents, construction administration, or whatever phases your contracts use. This tells you whether your fee split across phases matches reality.
  • Hours per sheet in the construction set. Total documentation hours divided by the number of sheets issued. It is crude, and a detail sheet is not a cover sheet, but it is a real, repeatable number that gets better every time you measure a project.
  • Revision hours. Time spent after a set was issued: responses to comments, addenda, redrawn details. This is where fixed fees quietly lose money.

Recording the Mac part without a timer

Punchcard is a Mac menu bar app that notices which app is in front during your day, by name only, and prints a receipt at the closing time you set: your top five apps with time on each, the rest as MISC, and a day total. There is nothing to start or stop, and it needs no macOS permissions.

For an architect, the receipt lines tend to map to kinds of work without any tagging. Your modeling or CAD app is design and documentation. Your PDF markup app is review and redlines. Mail and Calendar are coordination. A spreadsheet is often specifications, schedules or fee tracking. Reading those lines at the end of the day tells you what kind of day it was.

What Punchcard does not do matters just as much here:

  • No per-project tracking. It does not know which project a drawing belongs to, and it never sees file names. If you run several projects at once, you split the time yourself (see below).
  • No time away from the Mac. Site visits, client meetings in person, hand sketching and phone calls on the road are not recorded. Add them from your calendar.
  • No billing or invoicing. It gives you hours; rates, invoices and fee proposals stay wherever you keep them now.

If your practice needs hour-by-hour allocation to projects for weekly client billing, a timer or your office’s project system is the right tool, and this method is a check on it rather than a replacement.

Splitting time when projects overlap

Most weeks are not one project. Two habits handle it.

  1. A one-line note each evening. When the receipt prints, write the date, the day total, and which project the day was mostly about, with a rough split: “Tue, 7h 10m, Lakeview CDs about 5h, Elm Street CA the rest.” It takes under a minute because the receipt is in front of you.
  2. The CSV for the messy days. Punchcard’s CSV export has one row per session with start and end times and the app. On a day that jumped between projects, the session times usually line up with what you remember: the morning in the model was one project, the afternoon’s markups were another.

Keep the notes in a spreadsheet, one row per day. At the end of each phase, add up the rows for that project and phase.

Turning hours into the next fee

At the end of the project, you have the numbers the next proposal needs. An example, with invented round figures:

  • Construction documents took 180 hours at the Mac, plus 12 hours of meetings taken from the calendar: 192 hours in total.
  • The issued set had 40 sheets. That is 4.8 hours per sheet.
  • Revisions after issue took another 30 hours, about 16 percent on top of the documentation phase.

A similar project estimated at 50 sheets now starts from about 240 hours of documentation, plus about 38 for revisions, rather than from last year’s fee plus a bit. Multiply by your rate, compare the result with the fee you were about to quote, and you know whether to raise it, narrow the scope, or accept a thinner margin with your eyes open.

Do the same for each phase. Over two or three projects you build your own table of hours per phase and per sheet for your kind of work, which will serve you better than any rule of thumb, because it is yours. How to estimate hours for a quote when you never tracked the last job covers building a range when you only have partial data.

Reading the week, not just the day

Every Sunday Punchcard prints a week roll, and at the end of the month a month roll. During construction documents, watch the totals. Documentation is the phase where evenings creep in, and a week roll that keeps climbing is the early warning that the fee is being spent faster than planned. A scope conversation with a client is much easier halfway through the phase than after the set is issued.

The same rolls help with the less visible work too. If Mail and Calendar take a growing share of the week during construction administration, that is coordination time your fee for that phase needs to cover.

Questions

Does Punchcard see drawing names or project files? No. It records app names only, never window titles or document names. That is why the project split comes from your evening note.

Can a whole office use it for timesheets? No. It has no team features, reports to nobody, and each copy keeps its data on its own Mac. It suits sole practitioners and individual architects who want their own record.

Is it free to try? Tracking never expires and the CSV export works without a license. The first two receipts are free; printing after that needs a $9 one-time license that covers two Macs.