I clearly remember the first few weeks in the studio. What surprised me was where architects were spending their mornings. Most of them had Gmail open, rather than AutoCAD.
They weren’t busy choosing materials, sketching elevations, or drawing plans… you know, the work they actually spent five years in university learning to do. They were sitting in front of an empty draft, writing a decent reply to a contractor who had sent the wrong thing again.
I realized that week they had spent almost 10 hours on admin, emails, and scheduling. Also, even more hours in meetings or calls, and barely 4 hours on actual creative design.
Sure, they might be working in one of Italy’s biggest design studios, but the design work was a fraction of their time – and a small one at that.
Let’s call it what it is: The Creative Tax.
We go to architecture school to learn how to design beautiful spaces, how to master CAD and 3D modelling, and understand structural loads. Nobody teaches us how to chase unpaid invoices. Or how to write the same proposal for the 40th time. Not even how to run our own practice!
But the reality of architecture today is that admin work slowly takes over. It’s a tax on your energy, your creativity, and most importantly, your bottom line.
Every hour you spend manually typing out an email is a billable hour lost. If you charge 100€ an hour, those 10 hours of manual admin are costing you 1,000€ a week. It’s unsustainable, and honestly, it kills the joy of the profession.
However, architecture school made sure to teach us to expect long nights. That by hustling harder and sleeping less we would become real architects and master this profession.
Spoiler alert, that’s a lie and a very unhealthy one: the profession is taxing, sure, but “just working harder” is not the solution! Broken workflows are what makes the processes clunky, so optimisation is, for me, the real solution.
That’s when I discovered automation and AI.
And no, I don’t mean AI that generates soulless floor plans or weird midjourney renders. I mean the autonomous, invisible systems that run the boring stuff in the background. I built a custom workflow that drafts my client proposals in minutes. I set up systems that automatically sorts my inbox before I even set foot into the studio. I now have agents that follow up with clients who haven’t paid. I started using AI to replace the secretary I couldn’t afford, completely eliminating my “Creative Tax”.
The result? I got my hours back, and so did my colleagues.
That is exactly why I started this publication.
This isn’t a place for abstract tech theory. It’s a practical toolkit strictly for freelance architects and small studio owners who are drowning in their inbox.
Every week, I will share 1 dead-simple automation, AI workflow, or system you can copy-paste in 15 minutes to reclaim your time.
The ultimate goal of this newsletter is simple: to help you spend 90% of your time on creative design, and 10% on business systems.
If you are ready to stop working as a full-time secretary and go back to being an architect, hit the subscribe button below.
P.S. Next week, I’m sharing the exact setup that automates my inbox, sorting emails and drafting replies in my voice. Make sure you are subscribed so you don’t miss it.
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