In most kinds of work a first draft is allowed to be rough. I do not think an advisor gets one.

Ask how long a quote takes and the answer is usually three to seven hours on anything with complexity in it. What that number never says is which draft it is.

There is only one.

In most kinds of work a first draft is cheap on purpose. Something rough goes in front of the person who asked, early, and you find out you had the brief wrong while it still costs an afternoon to fix. The roughness is doing a job. It tells everyone this is a question, not an answer.

I do not think an advisor gets one. My read is that whatever goes back first is read as the proposal. Not a direction, not a check. The thing itself.

So the cheap version is not available. You cannot send four properties with a note saying you have not looked properly at any of them yet. You build the finished one, with the days in order and the times right and a reason each place is in there, and only once it is finished do you find out whether you had the trip right at all.

That is a strange order to be asked to work in. The moment you learn the most, which is the moment the client actually reads it, arrives after the expensive part instead of before it.

It also makes a revision cost twice. Once because the work is done again. And once because you were not wrong in a sketch, you were wrong at full finish, and the client watched a finished document be wrong.

I think that is part of why three to seven hours reads as high from outside the trade and ordinary from inside it. From outside it sounds like slow research. From inside it is the price of never being allowed to be provisional.

The trade's answers here are all aimed somewhere else. A tighter first conversation, fewer options carried forward, a fee that makes the speculative version somebody else's problem. Those are real and I am not arguing with any of them. They reduce how often you have to build the expensive first version. None of them makes an early version possible.

I write software for this trade, so I will say which part of this I am pointed at and label it as mine. It is not the hours. It is that being wrong is expensive. If a first version costs minutes instead of an evening, it can go out early, as a question rather than a proposal, and it can come back wrong on a Tuesday instead of coming back wrong on a Friday with your week already inside it.

That is my read and it is the thing I have the least outside evidence for, which is why I would rather have it corrected than agreed with.

So, two questions for anyone who does this for a living. How long does a first draft take you right now? And when one comes back wrong, is it usually wrong about the trip, or wrong about something you could have found out on day one?