Hacks to improve your life while in IB?
Life lately has just been waking up, working all day/night and back to bed.
Maybe the occasional workout but otherwise anything outside of work is literally non-existent.
Any tips on things to do to improve your life/mental health while grinding IB hours?
Really burning out and have no control over my workload or hours. Also frustrating that I am unable to have any semblance of a social life, make friends or go on dates.
I’m also so exhausted I struggle to wake up on time in the morning.
Any boundaries you set that help you get through the days?
Wrote a post on this a while back. See below"
10 Random Career Life Hacks
Those 10 suggestions are great…a few more:
- Take breaks and walk outside during the day, even if it’s around the block
- Minimize phone time (no doomscrolling) and replace with a riveting book like Shantaram…even reading 5 pages at a time helps
- Find someone at the bank that you can trust and spend 20 minutes with them unloading your stresses and see what advice they have - we have all been there
Really like this. You have very little time to invest in your well-being in the first years of IB, so you have to force it (avoid drinking too much, eating healthy). I would add the social aspect as well. I come from a family of doctors and engineers and there are many other jobs that also require very long hours. The difference between them and us is 90% well-being. There is a bunch of a**holes in this industry, some being very entitled, some being proud to find a small typo, some actual sociopaths; I have seen it all... But I also noticed that most of them are human beings. They will enjoy a good joke, a quick lunch, a chat... My performance is always much better when I have a little bit of fun with the team, despite having 3 hours of sleep for the last week.
It’s IB this is expected. The human body is not meant to work 24/7 and sacrifice everything else. In my experience small things don’t help until you address the elephant in the room which is IB and whether you should stay
Not in IB but passionate about getting our bodies to be more flexible in the event of working long hours / basically going against our own biology and finding ways to counteract that.
One thing you will realize is (and my tips will only focus on the things you can address) there will be no substitute for things such as consistent sleep <7hrs, lack of social connection and lack of activity. However, some things can alleviate added pressure on your body from a supplementation and routine perspective >
1) Habits:
- Box breathing or Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (can also be used during the day to reduce stress and make you more relaxed) - look up Andrew Huberman breathing to see what I mean.
- Hypnosis: no this is not stage hypnosis. It is a state of mind (which takes a little training) where you are intensely relaxed yet your brain is not “sleepy”. I like the podcast on spotify made by Adam Cox “The hypnotist” which has sleep-specific hypnosis scripts which have vastly improved my sleep (and made a lack of it more bearable).
- Get as much morning sunlight as possible. Screens mess with your natural sleep / wake cycle and it gets thrown out of whack. Again refer to andrew huberman but involves being outside as early as possible after waking and being exposed to light (even if cloudy) for 15mins minimum (30m is ideal)
-Sports of any kind but you know this. I would favor low intensity cardio / yoga to not add too much stress to your body / boost your wellbeing without increasing recovery demands drastically
2) Supplements
(I’m not a healthcare professional and always consult your doctor)
- Ashwaghanda lowers your cortisol (stress hormones). Take before bed and use when very stressed / low on sleep. Do not take for more than 6 weeks at a time (cycle it when needed).
- Magnesium Bisglycinate improves sleep quality and makes it easier to fall asleep
- L theanine: an amino acid found in green tea that promotes relaxation. Has great benefits when taken with coffee to reduce jitery feeling and improve relaxed focus without being sleepy nor agitated. You can take with caffeine if you drink caffeine late and will reduce the effect caffeine has on your sleep. You can also take it alone before bed.
- Creatine has also been shown to improve brain performance under sleep deprivation.
- Make sure your diet is mostly whole foods (a multivitamin can alleviate this but will not be as effective as this).
Hope some of this helps!
8 hours of sleep is significantly better than 7 in terms of slowing down aging and having peak mental/physical performance
7 hours in bed is probably the bare minimum and it's not even a full 7 hours asleep
So 8.5 hours in bed is ideal
The best time to go to bed is 10:00 pm
Quit
Couple of things:
1) Focus on quality of the projects over the quantities. I know our instinct is to say yes to as many projects as possible (specially early on) but I highly recommend thinking through what kind of projects you want to be working on for a couple of reasons. If you work on uninteresting projects, you are more likely to burn out. For example, I personally like working in only 1 vertical of the group I work in, so I would always be pushing back on any deals that the staffer would try to staff me on in the other verticals. Secondly, working on fewer, higher quality deals means you are less likely to run into conflicts between projects, and you can put in your 100% on one project than doing lower quality work across a different set of projects.
Doing the above will also allow you to avoid projects that you know will be super time consuming and won't go anywhere, for example a friday night staffing for a meeting on Monday that you know won't see the light of the day.
2) Focus on working with a single MD for a majority of your projects. They will take care of you since they can protect you from being staffed on other deals. Having one senior to work for also reduces conflicts - many times two different MDs will both say and think their project is more important and want you to work on both at the same time.
3) Don't send work back to your seniors the moment you are done with it. It's okay to take a bit longer to send it and buying you some time.
If you haven't done so already, there's a ton of stuff that you can do to create TEMPLATES to jump start: projects, emails, spreadsheets and the like, and then I would also say organize your file folders as best you can to mitigate working time.
Don't try and do all in one shot, take either a Sat or Sun over the course of 3-4 weekends.
Could you clarify what you mean by creating templates? Are you just saying to have very well organized precedents to mitigate the recreation of work? Sorry if I am misunderstanding, just curious what you meant.
Not to be a stickler, I'm assuming you mean re-creation, or so that you have time for recreation?... (just making sure not... never-mind)
Anyway, yep, exactly. For instance I have a lot of contracts, legal docs and the like that I need in the form of a template (highlighted areas needing to be filled out) and go through and do that for all forms I may need or use in the near future. That way I'm not using a document that's partially filled out and making changes on the fly (which takes a lot of time if you have to double and triple check each one for the name and information relating to the last deal / client / firm).
Another for instance, I have an email add-on that I use (for Gmail and G-Suite) "Canned Responses"; I create an email response to a Q that I know I'm going to get 100+ times, so... I create one very detailed response, save as template, and then from a list of pre-created emails I can generate which auto-response to send, where I might make an edit or two for a particular Interested Party and then send off. I also depend on "Boomerang" a lot (returns emails to your inbox at a future date and time - that add-on is now included in Gmail, where I prefer still prefer Boomerang's UI).
Presentations - same (no-brainer on this one), I have 3-4 ready to go as a base always, and same with any spreadsheets / models that I need to work on / have someone work on, where I dedicate a file folder to all of the templates that I have and need / will need more than a few times in the course of a year.
And overall file folders are pretty organized; not needing to search around much for what I need.
Also if I could add, the other posters are spot-on - having a gd eye for deals and maintaining / managing well-being are crucial.
If you have any degree of influence over the people you’re working with and for, please exercise it.
In order of benefit to quality of life / personal sanity:
1. Good project, good people
2. Bad project, good people
3. Good project, bad people
4. Bad project, bad people
First of all I wanna say that everything you wrote is completely normal. That’s exactly how my first 1.5-2 years went too, and things got infinitely better after that. Socially, happiness wise, healthwise, everything has improved dramatically since I escaped being the lowest on the totem pole. 95% of people have to go through the brutal, unforgiving haze of IB analyst with 0 personal progress to show for those years. That’s the trade off for the incredible career progress you experience during that time. So the first hack is to survive the first 18-24 months.
As for the next hack, what I would tell you are the first steps you should take as soon as you get some freedom are minimizing alcohol and drugs and starting a daily (ideally 7 day a week, minimum 5) exercise routine. These are very important for physical and mental health and longevity, and of course attractiveness. It’ll make you feel better and more in control of your life, bonus points if you include other self care items (skincare, hair care, reading, sports, good nutrition).
Then next hack, I would prioritize reconnecting with your high school and college friends. There’s a natural affinity and trove of shared experiences with those guys that you just won’t have with new people you try to meet via soccer club or something. The people you grew up with are the people you grew up with, there’s no changing that. You might honestly be surprised how much closer you all get after having developed a bit independently and then rekindling. So get those group chats active again and schedule some meet ups. Maybe revisit the hobbies and activities that brought you close to your friends in the first place.
Also, if it helps, remember you are still young and can bounce back quickly. Don’t be defeatist, trust that the future is bright. I’ve been back in the gym consistently for almost a year and low key am stronger than ever and look better than ever before despite working in IB. I also feel like my relationships with my friends are stronger than ever after rekindling, since now we all have money for travel and going out, as well as an appreciation for the separate journeys we took to reach this position. Don’t underestimate the perspective that IB gives you, you start to REALLY value your health and personal relationships and time the way you never did as a 19 year old university student smoking and drinking your time away.
Thank you for the perspective, very helpful
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