total hours of this consultant today was
hello and welcome back to today years old as i've said a gazillion times on this channel i'm
a consultant and i have seen so many consulting work life balance myths around instagram
twitter youtube and just through the grapevine that i want to make a video to bust consulting
work-life balance myths and to do that i am going to take you on a day in my life as a consultant
these silly bits of paper represent some of the common misconceptions i hear about what it's like
to work in consulting so i'll take you through an honest day in my life but before i do that i
just want to give you a bit of context as to who i am so i'm a technology consultant and i work for
accenture i just want to say that everything i share in this video is purely my personal opinion
i'm not endorsed by nor am endorsing the company it's just who i am um and i would just add to that
as well that i've also spoken to my friends who work at deloitte ey kpmg pwc and to be honest
my kind of experience is very similar to theirs so i think what i'm going to show you is a pretty
accurate general representation of what it's like to be in consulting at one of those types of firms
i've said i'm a technology consultant but what does that really mean well it's about connecting
companies with cutting-edge technologies and concepts to help them realize their strategic
business objectives good morning it's 7 30 on a surprisingly snowy monday morning snowing in april
um the plan is to get up have a bit of breakfast and be at the desk by 8.
i lay back down that might have been a mistake um
i'm not somebody who gets up on their first alarm if i'm perfectly honest um so what i tend to do
is i have teams on my phone uh i just check teams before i actually get up just to see
is there anything super critical that i need to apply to and i usually just do a couple of those
replies before i actually get up i've done those so now i'm gonna actually get up try again
okay it's just after eight o'clock and i'm gonna sit down to do the first task of the day
check my emails so there are three areas that my day generally breaks down into the first is i
have a team so i spend around 30 of my day doing kind of management people management team lead
responsibilities checking in on my team making sure they've got everything handling escalations
advising them on how to improve things and all that type of stuff so that's probably 30 of my day
i spend another 30 percent of my day looking at advisory stuff and that's the real core of
consulting type work and that's when we start with questions like how might we
and you might say how might we improve a certain process how might we become more agile how might
we do devops all that types of that type of stuff that would fall into the remit of technology
and that's kind of 30 of my day and as someone who is hopefully going to be a manager at some point
um i also have started looking for around 30 of my day into sales so that is around how you convert
those types of conversations into actual opportunities that you can close to grow
the business within the firm and i do this across a range of different areas with different
technologies so i'm spread with lots of things in different pies and that's just how i love it
in terms of meetings um everyone always says there's loads of meetings so let's see today
how many meetings we've got it is an unusually heavy day actually so my first meeting isn't until
9 30 which is good i used to have an 8 30 every day that's gone so we have one
one and a half two two and a half three three and a half four and a half five
six and a half seven and a half seven and a half i have seven and a half hours of meetings today
um i'm right before preparing for like a big piece of assessment work
um so it's a bit of a heavy heavy week in terms of meetings but i would say on
average i have between five and six hours of meetings a day so it's a bit above average but
not horrifically so right i better get on with checking all those emails
so i don't actually sit around in my pajamas all day um it's now 8 45 and once i've cleared my
initial backlog of emails i've got a rough to-do list and i've got a plan sort of plan structure
for the day i then like to go up and actually get dressed we upgrade to trackies and that kind of
marks the break of the start of the day to the real start of the day so i've just finished my
first call of the day and um got a few minutes before the next meeting so just quickly check in
with you guys um in terms of actually what tech i use so at the beginning of lockdown i used these
both qc 2 noise cancelling comfort oops headphones and they are the single best piece of kit i have
ever bought and i will do a review of them because they are so amazing but um i was also recently
treated to one of these and i'll put a link in the description down below it's a jabra speakerphone
which i now use for all of my work calls and it is the single best piece of tech i didn't know
i needed um it's great for calls um you can just control everything through this black panel here
it's a little touch panel and it's really handy way of being able to take calls throughout the day
because seven and a half hours of these on your head although they are very comfortable uh you
do feel like you kind of need to break from them after a while so this is a real game changer and i
didn't know i needed this until i got it so that has been a godsend right time for the next call
okay so it's 11 o'clock it's been a pretty solid morning of meetings and i'll just stop
for a quick tea break so um most meetings on a monday morning i think this is true regardless
of whether you're in consulting or any other job it's just getting some kind of status updates
um in one of my projects we work with a big offshore team what this means is when
you come online then already half their day is done so as soon as you come online
you hit the ground running and you're getting up to speed and just catching up with that status
and then another one of my meetings was around sales so um taking stock of what
conversations have we got coming up this week do we have all the material ready for that we've also
got a business review later tonight at six uh who doesn't love a six p.m dinner meeting um so
that's coming up later are we ready for that what do we need to do etc um so that has been morning
um i try if it's possible to multitask and do a kind of quick couple of jobs whilst i'm on a call
i will do them but um to be honest most of the time i just scribble down as many notes as i can
and collect up the actions and start them when i can do them with a bit more focus so uh i've got
half an hour now to my next meeting so i'm gonna crack off one of the jobs on my list
okay i'm having my lunch whilst also being on a call so i'll make this pretty quick it's 204
and i haven't really stopped yet this morning i'm just gonna have a quick bit of lunch whilst i'm on
this call i normally eat at my desk whilst on a call to be honest so i'm pretty pretty standard
day it's 20 to six and i finished my meetings for the day um my six o'clock got moved to tomorrow so
that's such a shame um so i can now make a start on the 19 actions i've accumulated throughout the
day the stuff i've got left to do are primarily things around the assessment that we're starting
this week that's really priority bit of work and that's the proper core consulting work that forms
the basis of to be honest any consulting firm so that's going to be number one on tonight's list
and i've also got some work around some kind of administrative people management type stuff
and i've got some work on some finances and some forecasting so um that's on the tray tonight right
let's start the day so it's 20 past six i'm so hungry i can't concentrate anymore so i'm gonna
make some dinner i try not to order take away more than once a week ideally less than once a week
so on a sunday night i batch cook a whole load of
food so that during the week i can just quickly reheat it on the go let's do that
so it's now 20 past eight and i have just finished that assessment framework uh consulting piece that
i had so what this involved was making sure we have the right questions to extract the
right information so that we can provide the right recommendations to the client about a particular
topic some of it was a bit technical so i had to do a bit of research make sure i understand all
the questions don't ask something that you don't understand and making sure that i've also set up
the right infrastructure so that with the data we gather we can efficiently write the report
it's going to be a pretty intense week of information gathering and report writing
so making sure that we've done the right level of prep will then make everything else so much easier
also whilst i was doing that the classic police fix hit so i am going to make a start on that
there are three tasks left to do one is a case study for some work we've done recently one is
some finances and one is some important uh people management admin stuff so uh i was one task
down but i gained tasks so i'm still net three tasks but um i haven't had a proper break since
i got up so i'm just gonna take a break and have a shower um i find that taking five minutes just to
have a quick shower makes a huge difference there was a time last year where i went like four days
without having a shower because i was so busy but honestly there is no excuse for that that's
frankly just gross and yeah i make time every day to shower now so we'll have a quick break
oh i always feel so much better for a shower um it's now hot past eight and i am flagging a little
bit because i know there's still a bit of a way to go this evening so i am gonna make a coffee and
that's my last bit of procrastination before i am gonna sit down and just boss out these last three
tasks and i am gonna put on some banger tunes the heat is motivated
right i've got my coffee we're going to make a start in the last part of the day
i actually really like working at this time i'm naturally a night owl not a morning person
so um this is where i kind of start to think the best and this is why i leave the tasks that need
the most brain power to the end of the day because i know that i work best kind of around now
but one thing helps me work even better bangor music
i love bandra because who couldn't be more productive when listening to this
and that's me done the time is 22 22.35 exactly which means that the total hours
of this consultant today was 14 and a half okay this is not what it's like every day consulting
comes with peaks and troughs and there'll be times like this week when you're pretty busy
and there'll be times where it's much quieter this is a bit of a stretch day if i'm honest
i normally do around 12 hours a day and to be honest that's a work-life balance i'm happy with
i like it i don't mind um so that's kind of where my natural work-life balance happy point is not
the same for everyone and to be honest i've seen consultants do more hours and be successful i've
seen them do more hours and be unsuccessful i've seen them do less hours and be successful so to
be honest i think it's around finding what works for you there probably isn't a hard and fast rule
but i work around 12 hours a day i i think from talking to some of my friends at other consulting
firms as well i think this is the pretty normal average i don't think i'm particularly special
so i think it's about normal what you could expect if you come to working consulting
um i hope you enjoyed this type of video uh it's a little bit different for me so it's been fun to
make it really interesting um i hope you found it interesting too if you have please give it a like
comment subscribe and i'm going to make more of this type of video
so in the next video we're going to compare the pre-covered and can we say post covered yet
and the lifestyle for current covid and compare the two work-life balances and see was one
better than the other and do a comparison join me then have a wonderful evening