How do you keep focused for such long hours?
It is well-known that you IB folks work extremely long hours everyday. What tips do you have for maintaining high concentration day in and day out? Especially you guys are doing such important work under huge pressure?
A PhD student here and I am working 10-10, 6-7 days a week and very often my concentration drops significantly after 4pm. Coffee does not help much. It keeps me awake but my brain does not function and struggle to generate ideas for my experiments etc. The bois in the same research group as me plan to work even longer hours as we all struggle to get good results. Appreciate any tips here.
A mix of stress, urgent project timelines and more highly caffeinated coffee usually keeps people focused.
Tried to give myself pressure by setting tight deadlines with collaborators. Yet I cannot force my brain to generate nice ideas.
Cocaine
I do not want to spend my already limited time in the lab to make that.
There is a very big difference between learning/studying vs. execution work. Learning/studying you can only stuff your brain for so many hours before your brain shuts down.
But for execution work (PPT work, excel modelling, etc) - many of these do not require tremendous brain power consistently compared to learning. Of course there are analysis that require a lot of thought and care, and you aim to make 0 mistakes in the job, but I feel like I was less tired in IB compared to studying for intense STEM classes (multivariable calc, advanced game theory, etc)
I would not really say it is really as demanding as learning new stuff/studying. It is often looking at experimental data and make decisions/generating new research idea.
From what I can tell it's all about organizing your work schedule. Maybe do the harder, more creative tasks in the morning and then leave the end of the day for the more menial data entry type tasks. Personally, the caffeine just messes me up and I've found that going off caffeine or using alternatives to coffee such as matcha or other teas can be really useful. I do know that most of the people I've seen in the industry do drink a few coffees a day. Much of banking is work that doesn't need serious concentration, such as formatting a powerpoint. If you need to be functioning at a very high level for 12 hours a day then that's very different.
I don't
I think people are forgetting that no IB analyst is truly "on" in intense focus mode for the entire 16 hour day. Those bends when you are in a crunch and getting wrecked (I.e butt in chair from 8:30Am - midnight w/ only enough time for bathroom breaks over 2-3 days) you are significantly less effective each day you are in that state.
Typically you are "on-call" from 9AM-2Am. But not all tasks require the same amount of mental energy and you do take breaks for lunch, coffee, waiting for comments to come back, dinner, working out. I would say it's 2-3 6 hour bends of pure focus which is more manageable than you think.
i always communicate with my deal team. I like to take a break around 5 or 6 to go workout if I have the time, and that usually breaks up my day. My firm allows wfh so changing up where I’m working in terms of setting also helps
Agree with the comments here, you are not in the same brain state as school. Learning new information or studying is exhausting. Changing all of the blue text to a slightly darker blue throughout a 60 page deck, or doing easy model stuff (once you know how to do it) is totally mindless. As much as IB is "important work" it also isn't. The work we produce is basically seeking the goalposts the MD and client already have, it's not as groundbreaking as it seems and every deck that goes out has a mistake (or 3) somewhere in it
I would get outside for at least 20 minutes twice a day, without your phone/earbuds/etc. Even if it's cold, go walk a lap around the building for 5-10 min. Grab a snack and a water and come back refreshed. Don't eat lunch at your desk and don't stare at your phone while you do. Try to keep your steps up too, I become super unproductive if I'm not getting steps in.
Look into the Pomodoro method. Not really practical for banking, hard to be taking a break every 20 min, I'd imagine it would work in PhD land though
Also unless you are grinding towards some immediate deadline, I wouldn't lengthen your hours if you're already struggling to think. If anything, go down to 8 hours and see if you produce better work.
Try yoga nidra / nsdr for half an hour when you run out of steam. Lots of free guided meditations on YouTube and anecdotally it gives you 2x the mental rest compared to equivalent sleep
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