Hi Reader,

Have you wondered about the weekly routine of any athletes?

It looks something like this:

• Monday: Strength and conditioning session focusing on overall strength and power.
• Tuesday: Intense training or speed work to improve cardiovascular endurance and speed.
• Wednesday: Moderate-intensity endurance training, such as a long run, bike ride, or swimming session.
• Thursday: High-intensity interval training or plyometric exercises to develop explosiveness and power
• Friday: Strength training session focusing on specific muscle groups and functional movements.
• Saturday: Game day or intense competition.
• Sunday: Complete rest day or low-impact recreational activities.

Best-in-class athletes swear by their weekly routines. It’s like rituals in their pilgrimage.

In this episode, let me talk about the three Weekly Rituals of an Architect. These three rituals can reclaim the glory of a professional.

The “One Meeting” of Every Week

We have too many meetings on our calendars every single day of the week - delivery stand-ups, project working group meeting, status review, trouble-shooting meetings and diary busters.

Diary busters are the dangerous ones - in the disguise of high-priority war-room situations, the working hours of a large number of people are drained out.

Remember: Everyone is solving problems, but as Architects - we are to solve different types of problems - the Design problems which fall into 3 categories-

• Business thinking (e.g. - identify/prioritize initiatives, create transition states, risk assessment, business cases)
• Design thinking (e.g. - service blueprint, platform design, service design)
• Non-functional design (e.g.- performance, scalability, security design of solutions)

Look at the way you can build chunks of business, design, and non-functional design work and deliver them week after week.

A consulting engagement is 8-15 weeks long but a large delivery program can be 6 to 12 months long for a Solution Architect (unless you want to be part of end-to-end implementation which we should be often).

Whatever it is, it is a number of weeks tied together till the completion of the engagement. Think about bringing out chunks of your work every week and show the deliverables and progress to your stakeholders (business Sponsor, Product Owner, Program Owner, Sales Leader).

Plan and manage a meeting scheduled at the same time every week where you present your work to your stakeholders. You are the host of this workshop. You are the host of this weekly party.

If you do make meaningful progress and engage your stakeholders, after 4-6 occurrences, people will start attending these meetings regularly. If you do it quite well, after 12 weeks - you will set this up as the benchmark for the team.

Next, you’ll need to make progress every single day so that you are ready to present in weekly meetings.

2-Hours of Every Day

Once you set up a weekly schedule, you know what you need to work on every week.

So start creating design & architecture deliverables every single day that shows off your knowledge & progress.

Spend one hour a day exclusively on your design deliverables. On some days focus on business thinking, other days on design thinking or on capturing design decisions related to non-functional aspects of architecture.

Spend another hour a day capturing the output of the thinking on the whiteboards (Miro) or on presentation slides. In Seth Godin’s words - you are getting ready for “shipping” the work.

You - as a host - need to be ready with your deliverables by the time next week’s party arrives.

So, if you have scheduled a weekly review with customers, you should spend 5x2 = 10 hours of time thinking and packaging the work.

If you take care of those 10 hours and your weekly schedule, your architecture deliverables will take care of themselves.

As Solution Architect, spend 80% of your time on the “4 high-impact areas of a Digital Solution Architect” (see MM Ep 14 for more on this).

Journal your Journey Daily

Building things progressively needs discipline. But it needs a discipline of another sort to capture your progress, to reflect on your own work.

When we do this consistently our work life would get a new meaning.

Socrates was prophetic when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living.

Take a lot of notes. From meetings, and discussions as well as from the podcasts you listen to and the articles you read.

Create a Word or Excel file or a Notion workspace to save these notes. Reflect often. In six months you will be a different person in terms of your confidence & mindset.

Be structured in curating your notes in the journal

• If you want to capture the details of past thinking, or discussions with a tenured employee in a customer organization tag them under the as-is section.
• If you reflect on your approach, methods - keep them under approaches
• If you reflect on the design decisions, ways of working. principles you are adopting - you can catalog them under target architecture.

Remember - you are not just taking notes or creating a journal, you are creating a case study of your career & your life. You are creating the raw material for your next job, next customer presentation, and future consulting assignment.

Making of Champions

Some say that champions are made every week.

That’s wrong. Champions are not made in a week.

Champions are not made overnight. They are made through sweats, burns, and bleeding in the practice. Through the process of perfecting their craft.

Perfecting the craft needs weekly cycles - prepare, perform, reflect, and repeat. It is like stacking the bricks of the wall, one at a time, till the wall is done.

Do you know that the Great Wall of China is made of 3.8 billion bricks and it took 2000 years to build it? Anything “great” needs cycle time for laying the bricks.

You look after 6 months - you are stunned by the progress without knowing that the performer has gone through 26 cycles of improvement.

That’s the power of rituals.

Einstein said, “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world”. Nobody can beat what you compound in weeks!

Set up a weekly ritual for yourself. You will never regret it.

More power to you!

Till next week.