Lessons learned working 90 hours last week

08Jun09

Although I’ve been in consulting for the past 5 years, and although I’ve spent more time away from home than I’d prefer, I’ve been pretty lucky in terms of my work hours. Most weeks I’d work a bit more than 40 hours + travel, so figure about 50 hours on average. That was all fine and dandy, but came crashing to an end last week.

I was sitting on the beach (fancy consulting term for being in-between projects), when I got a note from a Director in my practice that needed help with a project proposal. 90 hours later, the proposal was out the door, and I was back to my beachcoming ways.

As I ate dinner at my desk, worked til past midnight, and toiled away on the weekend, I got to thinking about what I’ve learned.

First…work stuff:

1) How to price a proposal - boring excel stuff. Once I leave the firm, I will likely never use this skill again.

2) Managing people that bill out at 5x my bill rate. The dynamics of working with Managing Directors and Partners was interesting. Lots of emails flying around, lots of people not reading the stuff that I wrote back. Maybe I’ll write more about this after I leave the firm.

The more important things that I learned.

3) No investment banking for me – I initially applied to business school to transition from consulting into investment banking. Yes, the Ibanking money is nice, and I’d learn how businesses make money, but I can’t put up with the hours. Its too depressing being at the office for 85 hours a week, eating every meal at your desk, and canceling weekend plans. I’m not interested in this. I still want the i-banking skills, just not the hours.

4) Excel is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because you if you design your model right, you can make seemingly hard changes pretty quickly. This leads me to why its a curse. Once word gets out that you know Excel, Partners want multiple scenarios, price points, and options. If I didn’t know excel, I probably could have been done with work by 6 pm everyday.

5) I’m a genuine news junkie – Apparently a plane disappeared last week. As both a news and Lost freak, I wanted to learn more about this, but was so busy that I missed all the updates. I’m still trying to get updated on the flight, but I feel that I missed the media event.

Probably the most important thing I learned was this. …I need to leave work! I’m leaving for school soon enough, I might as well do it without any more 90 hr weeks.