Running with a bicycle on your back
Image by Lorenzo Cafaro from Pixabay
I am almost embarrassed to tell you that I haven’t jumped on the dwg bandwagon until 2022. On the other hand, I have a feeling that I am far from alone among acousticians. It is common that we “paint” on PDF files instead of working with “real” dwg files. This has been a thorn in my eye for many years. PDF painting works fine if you are only going to do one (1) drawing and no updates, preferably in a small building. But that’s not how it works! To do multiple revisions of drawings in large multi-storey building can easily take hours to do in Bluebeam Revu, because it is not the right tool for the job. For example, I recently did an update of a school with new floor plans – 18 drawings in total. With Revit, I could update them in minutes, what would previously take at least half a day. I was smiling the whole of last week.
A friend of mine told me a saying that when you are stressed and constantly “putting out fires”, you often neglect to invest some time in the development of more effective work methods. Even if you know of a better way of completing the task at hand, it might require 100 hours to implement it. So, the improvement gets postponed indefinitely, in favor of constant upkeep. That’s where the saying comes: It is like running with a bicycle on your back. You want to reach your destination as fast as possible, and of course, it would be a lot faster to jump on the bike and start pedaling, than to run there with the bike on your back. But it takes a bit of time to remove the bike from your back, put it on the ground and get up in the saddle. If you are stuck in tunnel vision, chances are that you will keep running because you have to put out the next fire before you can start using the bike. Hint: the good day to do this investment in time will NEVER come. So, you might just take down the bike and get going, no matter the cost. You will win it back later.
In my case, the pressure had been building for so long that I couldn’t take one more PDF session with drawings. I HATE IT! It is worse than trying to screw a screw with the wrong bit. It is more like screwing a screw with a hammer. It works with a bit of force, but it is not the most elegant way of doing it. Now, we are working on templates for airborne sound insulation, impact sound insulation and façade drawings. These three shows up in every single project now. And our projects have become larger and larger over time, so I finally came to the point of no return and started to learn from my colleague who is a structural engineer and knows Revit very well. I invested a couple of days in the learning process. Shortly thereafter, another colleague of mine called in with a sick kid, hours before a big delivery. If I hadn’t learned Revit before this bump in the road, I would have missed the delivery for sure. Now, I could do the updates, link a couple of updated dwgs and a couple of hours later I was finished – with significantly higher quality too! The alternative, with PDF painting, would have resulted in a missed deadline. And no sleep that night for yours truly. Even though it is not fun to have such a turd sandwich land on your desk with no warning, as long as you have proper tools and know-how to solve the problem, you are less likely to stress out about it. It is a huge difference between being responsible for a problem that you do not know how to solve nor how long it will take to solve it, and a problem that you can and know how to solve. The latter is just a matter of clock-hours and then if it is required, you can force the delivery and crunch late occasionally. You will see the light at the end of the tunnel from the start. And that helps – a lot!
To conclude, I am slightly euphoric about my newfound love for Revit. It is not often that you learn how to use a new tool that makes you 10X faster and with higher quality. Revit does exactly what I need in exactly the right way, to maximize my workflow. A rough estimate is that I will save about 4-8 hours per week. That is very significant when you extrapolate over a whole year.
So, do you also have a bicycle on your back? If so, why shouldn’t you start pedaling right now?