7 Simple Steps to Avoiding Investment Banking Burnout

How do you avoid burnout when you work 80-100 hours per week and are constantly in the office, “on call” and sometimes even sleeping under your desk?

This question came up the other day with a reader who had recently completed a banking internship – and I realized that avoiding death by Excel might interest you as well.

These tips apply even if you’re not working in investment banking specifically – anything where you’re sitting motionless in front of a computer for extended periods can lead to burnout.

1. Take Vacations

You might wonder how you can take a vacation if you have to work 80-100 hours every week.

Although you do work a lot, senior bankers understand that you need some time off – especially once you’ve been there for awhile and have proven yourself. Analysts usually take a week off after the end of their first year.

I took a vacation after several of my deals had been announced and there was some downtime (before anyone noticed that I wasn’t doing anything).

2. Exercise – Don’t Watch TV (Or Surf the Web)

Since you get home late at night (or sometimes not at all), there’s always a temptation to watch TV or surf the web when you have free time. No one else is awake, right?

Even though I’m fanatical about movies and serialized dramas, I avoided them as much as possible in banking and instead went to the gym whenever I had a spare moment.

There are plenty of 24/7 gyms in major cities, so get out there and find them – places that close at 9 PM are useless.

If you’re concerned about getting urgent email at 3 AM, keep your Blackberry on hand and check it every 15 minutes – if you keep your sessions to an hour or less, this isn’t much of a problem.

3. Take Mini-Vacations

So maybe you can’t afford to take a week off and go on a cruise to the Isle of Lesbos. But you probably can afford a few hours at the spa.

Sometimes if it’s slow enough you can also take a Saturday off and go on a “retreat” instead.

I get a lot of questions on money – on whether there’s pressure to spend money to fit in and how much you can really save, for example.

If you spend money on a day off rather than on a plasma TV or a new apartment, you can save quite a bit and avoid burnout.

4. Live with Friends

Take it from Logan’s introduction to Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Banker:

“This fall, I moved into an apartment in one of TriBeCa’s most exclusive areas with seven guys from school. Five guys ended up living in an apartment upstairs and three of us took a place directly below them.”

Living with friends helps you avoid burnout – even if you get home late there’s usually at least 1 other person awake and you can stay away from TV/web surfing.

You might actually want to spend $5,000/month on rent in New York, but living with friends can save a lot on your pimped-out apartment rent as well.

5. Spend Time with Non-Bankers

One of the untold benefits of banking is developing good relationships with friends at your bank. When you spend 80 hours a week with someone, it’s hard not to get to know him or her well.

But there’s a downside as well: you can end up spending time only with your friends in finance, and you forget that not everyone stares at Excel all day.

Much of the time when you’re with banker friends, everyone talks about the same topics: what bonuses will be, how awful their latest pitch is, and whether the MD is having an affair.

It’s good to know what’s going on elsewhere in the industry, but it also helps to get away and realize there’s more to life than work.

6. Minimize Unimportant Work

This is a tough one, especially if you’re new. We saw how spending too much time on the wrong type of work can ruin Friday nights, but that’s just one example of this phenomenon.

Other examples: spending time formatting PowerPoint when you should send it to Presentations instead; spending days writing a first draft when it’s going to be revised endlessly anyway; going back and forth over email when a quick phone call would settle things instantly.

Some people, like the Associate I wrote about, like to spend time on pointless work and there’s not much you can do about it. But after you learn who’s reasonable, try to gravitate toward bankers who don’t waste weekends of your time by forcing you to screen for companies housed in blue buildings.

7. Learn to Say “No.”

Wait, don’t you have to say “yes” to everyone as a junior banker?

No, not really.

If you have other looming deadlines that are more important, “I can’t do that right now – I have to finish all these other projects by tomorrow” is a valid excuse (you can’t do this right away – you need to have been there awhile and established yourself).

In the beginning you’ll overestimate how much you can accomplish. And for summer interns and other “newbies,” that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

But there are diminishing returns to how much you learn with each new project, and you’ll learn that putting in 20% more hours for a 5% higher bonus is not worth it – especially if you don’t plan to stay in the industry for the long-term.

In private equity interviews and most other “post-banking” type interviews, all you need are 2-3 good projects to discuss. So if you already have 5 deals under your belt, the 6th one will not make a difference no matter how amazing it is.

So learn to say “no” if you want to preserve what sanity you have left.

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