How do investment bankers handle long hours?
“I worked 70 hours last week,” says an analyst at RBS, which as a state owned institution might be expected to go easier on people. “There are no restrictions on our hours at all. It’s normal to work from 9am to midnight.”
This quote is taken from an EFC report about the long hours associated with investment banking. 70 hours per week is considered the minimum and can go up to as many as 100 hours per week. How do investment bankers handle these long hours? How do you keep yourself from being burned out?
If you cut down on everything else you'll be fine biologically. Wake up, get to work, come home, go straight to bed. Don't stay up later than need watching netflix. Weekend sleep in as much as possible. You won't be sleep deprived. The problem though becomes dealing with feeling down because you do nothing other than work. Most people rationalize that it's temporary, and spend money to remind themselves of what this job means financially.
masturbate 3-4 times a day
Gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers in this racket.
Not a banker, but a former military guy here. I had to deal with this a lot. I was regularly pulling > 80 hours a week in some jobs, and during my university years my training involved multiple military schools where I had to function over a month at a time never getting more than 4 hours a night.
There isn't much you can do. The biggest part of it is stay in shape. Sure that workload prevents you from ever becoming a bodybuilder but you can do a lot with a few minutes of HIIT training(google it) every day or two.
Second be pepared and in good health. The less sugar/caffeine/alcohol you body is used to going in the easier it will be to keep you energy levels up.
Stay as active as possible. Not just mentally but physically. Falling asleep at you chair? Stand up if you can. If you cant push your chair aside and kneel for a few minutes. Still not working? Get to the stairwell, do some pushups, then hop/sprint up the stairs a few stories until you blood is pumping a bit faster.
Last but not least master the art of the mini-nap. While in basic training I had a watch with some semi-digital features(this was back in 2005). I set it to beep every two minutes and by doing so I was able to keep myself right at a perpetual haze where I just barely had my eyes open and was hovering between sleep and awake. I never got caught. Use the same principle and learn how to catch 5 minute shit-naps.
Former military guy here myself. I am a big fan of going to the stairwell to do pushups/sprint up stairs. Always works.
As WSO062014 pointed out, you can work 70+ hrs a week and still get 7hrs of sleep so you're not in a constant zombie mode.
The reality is that during your day, you're not usually working the full 12+ hrs at 100%, for several reasons (usually waiting for your VP/Ds/MDs to give you comments on your work, or like waiting on a business to update their forecast for you to put in your model). So you end up browsing the net (Hi WSO!). At the associate level you spent a big chunk of our day time sitting (or snoozing) through meetings. So your day is not THAT eventful or tiring, you chit-chat/go to coffee with teammates or clients etc..
I do find that the evening is busier though, that's usually when VPs and above leave for the day and drop some shit on your desk on their way out, or when the client finally goes home and you can start doing the work you were supposed to do during he day but they kept calling you to rant about Trump being elected as president.
Add to the fact that people (especially juniors) like to brag about how busy they are and feel important sitting waiting for your associate/ VP to give you formatting comments on your pitch, and you get that long-hours/hard working reputation.
Note: just a caveat, what I wrote above isn't entirely true when you're staffed on some intense transactions where you wont sleep for a good few months. A colleague in m&a just closed a deal that's been running since august and has not gone home before 3am since, yes even on weekends. How you deal with that? Lots of caffeine, and an eye for the light at the end of the tunnel (Hi buyside!)
By not being a pussy
1) Realize that most junior bankers DO NOT work 100 hrs. a week. Many don't even work 80 hrs. They may be at the office for that amount of time, but if they were at Big 4 accounting or Big Law, their time sheets would not say 80+ billable hrs. week-in and week-out 2) Quit eating like crap and using caffeine as a crutch. Sugar and simple carbs bring crashes and you build a tolerance to caffeine, which eventually catches up to you 3) Work out (sorry - not cardio bunny style). Go lift and do strength exercises. Gals this goes for you too 4) Set aside time for yourself on the weekend to do something that you WANT to do, even if this is only for an hour or two 5) Get faster at what you have to do so that you have more time to do what you want to do
The burnout comes and goes in waves - not really a way to avoid that as it just depends on the deals and how hard the team is pushing to get them done.