August is always a slightly strange month…
Projects don’t stop because the schools have broken up. Planning applications still need submitting, drawings still need finishing, emails continue to arrive and clients quite reasonably still expect things to move forward. At the same time, summer brings with it the opportunity to spend more time away from work – particularly when you have a young family.
Finding the balance between the two has taken me a while.
▶︎ Visit: Henbant Permaculture Farm & Campsite
A different relationship with work
Earlier in my career, I probably measured progress by how busy I was.
Long hours felt productive. Saying yes felt like the right thing to do. Taking on another project, working another evening or sacrificing a weekend seemed part and parcel of trying to get somewhere.
Looking back, I spent far too much time working too hard, often for too little, and frequently for somebody else.
Experience changes that.
Running my own architectural practice has certainly not meant working less, but it has allowed me to become much more deliberate about how, when and why I work.
There will always be busy periods. There will always be deadlines that require an extra push and projects that occupy more headspace than expected. I enjoy what I do, so I don't particularly want a rigid separation between work and everything else.
But I have become much better at recognising that being constantly busy isn't necessarily the same thing as doing good work.
Sometimes the most important business decision is simply knowing when to say no.
Making room for life
Having a family inevitably changes your perspective on time.
When your children are young, summers are finite. There are only so many school holidays, camping trips, days out and weeks where they genuinely want to spend most of their time with you.
You don't get to bank those days and use them later.
That has probably been one of the biggest changes in the way I approach work as I've got older. I still want the practice to grow, I still have ambitions for it and I care enormously about the projects we take on. But success has to accommodate a life outside the studio, otherwise I'm not entirely sure what the point of it is.
That doesn't mean disappearing for six weeks every summer.
For us, the opposite actually seems to work better.
Rather than one long holiday, we tend to break the summer up into shorter trips – a few days camping, some time away, back home for a period, then off again.
From a work point of view, it works surprisingly well.
I can get away properly, come back into the studio, catch up with projects and clients, deal with anything that has developed while I've been away and then head off again without feeling that I've disappeared for an enormous block of time.
It creates a rhythm rather than a complete stop.
Clients generally understand
One thing I've probably learnt to worry about less is how clients perceive taking time away from work.
Providing people know what is happening with their project, communication is good and expectations have been properly managed, most people completely understand that you occasionally go on holiday.
Quite often they're doing exactly the same thing.
The important part is planning for it.
August therefore becomes less about pretending the summer holidays aren't happening and more about structuring work around them. Applications are programmed, deadlines are considered in advance and clients know when I'm going to be available.
There may be a couple of emails sent from a campsite along the way – running your own business is never quite as clean-cut as the out-of-office reply suggests – but there is a significant difference between checking something because you choose to and feeling as though you can never switch off.
That distinction has become increasingly important to me.
Better balance, better work
I also think there is a wider benefit to working this way.
Architecture is ultimately about people and the way they live. Spending every waking hour sitting in front of a computer doesn't necessarily make you better at understanding either.
Getting outside, travelling, camping, walking, seeing different places and simply having some distance from the studio all help reset things.
Often, coming back after even a few days away gives me a much clearer view of a project than I had before leaving.
The same applies to the business itself.
Stepping away occasionally gives you the space to question whether something is actually working. Whether a project is right for the practice. Whether you're charging properly for what you're doing. Whether something really needs doing immediately. And perhaps most importantly, whether you should be doing it at all.
Those are questions I probably didn't ask enough when I was younger.
Working to live
I don't think I've discovered the perfect work-life balance. I'm not convinced such a thing really exists.
Some weeks work wins. Other weeks family does. Sometimes an application needs to go in and plans change. Sometimes the weather is good and the laptop can wait until tomorrow. The aim isn't to divide everything neatly in half.
It's to create a business stable enough to provide financially, interesting enough to provide professionally, and flexible enough to leave room for everything else that matters.
For me, that's increasingly what running a successful practice looks like. August tends to bring that into sharper focus than most months. So this summer has included plenty of architecture, drawings, planning applications and emails – but also tents, campsites, days away and time with family.
The work will still be here in September, the summer of 2026 won't.