Best Organization Tips for New Analysts?
Knowing that most of the stress from IB comes from being asked to handle 100 tasks at once - how do you guys optimize your schedule and keep all of your ducks in a row? I’m curious about the following things:
1) Time Management : How do you budget your time when your work day starts? I.e how do you decide “I’m going to work on this PB for 30 minutes, then after this call I’m going to tweak this model for an hour, then I’m going to do some industry research for this pitch for 30mins” etc? Is it arbitrary or fully based on deadlines? What applications do you use to keep yourself on schedule?
2) Project Management: For each deal, how do you organize all the relevant emails, notes, and documents? Is your PC drive super organized in a way that differs from firm wide document folders? What’s your strategy to for easy retrieval of the exact information you need on a deal?
3) Relationship Management: What does your digital Rolodex look like? How often do you keep with your network / what does building your network look like as an IB professional? Is networking as essential to buy side recruiting as it was for IB? How do you “manage-up” internally to make the overall process smoother?
I’ve never been the best with organization and I’d like to fix that early so it doesn’t contribute to early burnout. In college I’ve noticed the pre med type kids using all sorts of gadgets like IPads, OneNote, Notation etc. And it always seemed so efficient. I wonder if any of you mid/top bucket analysts have some tips for getting here that could benefit us all coming in after you.
Hey, just an analyst but I can speak to some of the things that work for me:
- I make sure my inbox is fully empty 3 times a day; in the morning, around 5/6pm and before I clock off at night
- The above isn’t to say that every task should be dealt with; I have two sub-folders within my inbox (“Actioned - Internal” and “Actioned - External”) where anything that is being worked on gets flagged and moved to (e.g. if I have sent an associate something to review and waiting for comments - this is so I don’t forget about things I need a response to)
- On flagging, I find it super important to flag/mark complete every email I receive, and flagging is useful because it links with Microsoft To-Do (I recommend using - it’s simple to get started with and build out a system that works for you)
- My Microsoft To-Do for work is set-up on a deal/project basis (e.g. Project ABC section will have all the tasks related for that project). I manually moved flagged emails into the relevant folder the same times I clean out my inbox
- Email folder structure goes: Mandates, Business Development (i.e. pitches), Admin (e.g. communications with staffer/broader team/firmwide blasts/anything else that’s semi regular), News (I setup rules to move most things here, but will let 1-2 newsletters hit my main inbox for things I’m actually interested in reading)
- Within the Mandates / live deals folder, I have a folder for each deal. I don’t have the best method to sub-folders; at the moment I just have one sub-folder I move important data/info into if I feel I need to come back to it later
- Most of the time you can find useful things by using Outlook’s search (e.g., searching things like “From: VP To: Client Subject:Industry Data”)
- From the above I have a good idea when things need to be done by, so I approach things based on deadlines - I find it too unstructured to do approach it any other way. Some do it by difficulty of the task but so far I’ve found that deadlines usually take precedence above anything else
- Timeboxing is useful and I did it during college, but the tricky part is that things can get dropped on you out of the blue so I wouldn’t try over-engineer this
- On my network, it can be hard to find breathing room when you’re really jammed so I have definitely slacked on this, but I just tend to blast a few linkedin messages now and then and have a coffee 1-2 weeks after / things are quiet
My one rec is that you don’t try front load and do all the “productivity tips” and setup the fancy software as you start working - the above worked for me only because I started very basic (folders, To-Do, manually filing etc.) and slowly figured out how to organize things in a way that helped me. Don’t use things like Notion at the very start - you should see what the weak points in your day to day are and see how you can work a system in that addresses the issues
Wait why are you still doing 1-2 coffee chats a week? just to build goodwill?
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