What did you accomplish last week? is an anxiety-inducing question that nine times out of 10 would cause me to break out in a sweat. US federal employees received this exact email from Elon Musks new government outfit, the Department of Government Efficiency DOGE saying that a response was directly linked to their future employment. Could you easily answer such an email?Six months ago, I might have struggled to answer. But recently our practice has been pushing for a more metric-driven way to practise (involving timesheets and project tracking). This isnt revolutionary and reflects a general move by architects encouraged by the wider industry to build deep databases of metrics about our designs for buildings and how those buildings perform over their lifetimes, part of a wider effort to help transform the built environment and measure progress.But could it be that we are missing out on the data relating to how we complete projects? Time and money are standard metrics, but what else could you track within your business to help improve it?AdvertisementWe now live in an era where data is a new currency. Increasingly, companies offer users the ability to collect and self-track their own metrics, particularly through the boom in health apps. Im not immune to this myself, having tracked sleep, calories and blood glucose, all in an effort to find correlations and make marginal gains in mundane things such as sleep quality and avoiding the afternoon crash. Im now starting to wonder whether the same thinking could be applied to the much more significant and demanding part of my life: architecture.When I brought this up recently with friends, we ended up naming a number of tracking metrics beyond billable hours. Here are some of our favourites:Project Satisfaction Score internal score of 0-5, how much do you like the project?Passive Systems Index how many passive systems are in the project and can these be tracked to compare success across design stages?AFK Ratio a time-based measure of how often you are dragged away from your keyboard for site visits/meetings/internal reviewsBoldness Score an internal metric on how innovative the design is, accepting that the boldest isnt always the bestDrawing Revision Index - just one more change...Biscuit-to-Email Ratio self explanatoryAlthough nothing has quite yet made it beyond indulgent pub talk, this debate has started a meaningful conversation around what are you good at? and what do you want to improve?The interesting thread this topic pulls on is that, simply by asking what is worthy of tracking, you immediately start to think deeply about that particular area of practice. A practice-specific sustainability index will offer the bonus of immediately bringing this to the forefront of everyones mind, let alone the practical benefit if this is tracked across different project stages and compared across different projects.Of course, adding another layer of admin is unlikely to be welcomed by most jaded practitioners, and spamming clients with customer satisfaction surveys probably wont boost future referrals. But if theyre well-considered and integrated, Id argue that these metrics could benefit the practice as a whole and offer a more complete picture of architectural practice for year-on-year comparison than end-of-year financials alone.AdvertisementIf you were to apply this same rigour in daily practice, the next time you got a late-night email from a wealthy client asking what have you accomplished last week? you wouldnt be stumped. You might even be able to expand on exactly how you and your workforce felt about your achievements, how deeply it resonated with your clients and how many biscuits it took to power through your inbox.Toko Andrews is an associate at Tunbridge Wells-based Kaner Olette Architects and associate lecturer at the University for the Creative Arts2025-03-17will hurstcomment and share