How to have a good and productive work day as a strategy consultant
Days in consulting can be hectic.
Multiple tasks to manage, fast turnaround times, and tight deadlines can easily lead to feeling overwhelmed, doubting yourself and doing unnecessarily long hours.
Ask me how do I know.
When I started my job in consulting a year ago, I experienced these things regularly. And in these moments, I would turn to writing.
Long story short, by going through how I feel, I wrote my way to a couple of solutions - a list of a few things I need to practice every day to have a productive and feel-good kind of day at work.
The list is by no means revolutionary, but keeping these things in mind helps me feel in control throughout the day, even if things get hectic.
So, here are 5 things I do to have a good and productive day as a strategy consultant.
1) Always start from the end
When I studied biomedical sciences and later clinical nutrition, a large chunk of my work would consist of producing essays or presentations. I was always working towards deadlines, but these were far away, with few - if any - review points scheduled throughout with a supervisor.
In consulting, though, things are different.
The deliverable timelines are short and what you produce tends to be reviewed a million times before it reaches the client.
And because of that, you need to be quick and work with the end goal in mind at any time. Otherwise, you will end up boiling the ocean and producing things nobody needs.
By saying 'work with the end goal in mind', I mean literally starting from the end. What is the final deliverable you need to produce? Structure it now and populate slides with the type of content you will need to make your point.
Having this rough outline serves three purposes:
- one, you have a roadmap of what you need to find and are therefore much more effective at searching for information
- two, it allows your manager to correct your approach before you put a lot of time into it
- and three, it is a starting point for managing your time. If you know you have ten slides, six of which need additional research, you can estimate how long each will take. You can then schedule this into your day and monitor your progress, knowing whether you need to speed up on some tasks to meet the deadline.
This reframe alone made a massive difference in my days and gave me greater control over my time and confidence in my direction.
2) Make decisions fast and don't get stuck
In consulting, you will frequently work with imperfect information and there will be questions you don't know how to answer.
This can leave you feeling blocked and unsure of how to proceed.
The worst thing you can do in these moments is to get stuck on a single aspect of a problem and try to solve it in your mind - you won't. Time will slip through your fingers and you will not make much tangible progress, especially if the problem branches out in multiple directions, which is what they like to do.
But there is a very simple strategy to remedy this - writing.
When you write your thoughts down, you will make mental space to think about the problem because your mind won't be occupied with the problem itself. You will make room to reflect on it, look at it from different perspectives, identify any questions or missing pieces of data you need to solve it and call out any assumptions you're making.
Think of it as a tool to discuss with yourself: you take a problem and question it until you come up with a reasonable approach. On top of this, instead of agreeing with whatever your mind throws at you in the first instance, you consider additional options and weigh the pros and cons that ultimately lead you to a much richer conclusion.
It's a simple yet effective strategy to maintain momentum or get unstuck and investing these few minutes to write and get clarity on your direction, will pay off multiple times over when executing the task.
3) Be familiar with the essentials
I don't know about you, but I love to explore different topics until I deeply understand its every nook and cranny.
When studying biomed sciences and nutrition, I hated scattered pieces of information that didn't make sense as a whole or ones I didn't fully understand from start to finish.
This often meant expanding beyond the course textbook or lecture notes, which was obviously time-consuming, but the longer hours were compensated by being in awe of how amazing and complex our bodies are.
In consulting, though, this is impossible because there is simply no time to explore a single topic so thoroughly - definitely not during working hours.
You will often receive more documents than you can humanly process, so at the beginning of each project, you must separate the essential pieces of information from nice-to-haves.
If you're familiar with the Pareto principle, it is precisely that: which 20% of content do you need to be familiar with to get 80% of the results?
To identify the 20%, you can, for example, quickly skim through all documents that land in your lap to find which ones are important. Or, if you are looking for specific information, use cmd+f to scan the document quickly.
4) Focus on what has been asked
Another way that helps me keep my days productive is to focus exactly on what has been asked.
If your manager wants XYZ done, ensure you understand what they mean and use their instructions not as a vague suggestion but as a scaffolding for your next work.
It's like writing essays at university. If your professor wants you to talk about the pros and cons of vitamin E supplementation in patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, covering the pros only clearly won't cut it.
Just like you would use your professor's instructions as a roadmap for what your essay needs to cover, use your manager's instructions as a roadmap for what needs to be delivered.
5) Reduce the friction of doing tasks
There will be multiple tasks thrown at you, some with higher priority than others.
Managing the tasks with high priority is easy - you just do them now. But when it comes to those lower priority items, they tend to get pushed aside and stamped over by new priorities.
As time passes, you get into the habit of moving them to later dates and may feel some resistance to doing these low-priority tasks.
My solution to that is to reduce the friction of starting the task in the first place. And the way I would do that is to at least think through an overall approach or structure as soon as the task lands on my desk. If I can't do that immediately, I try to do it by the end of the day.
This means that I don't need to start the task from scratch because I have the overall approach laid out for me. As a result, when you have a free window between your high-priority items, you can squeeze in doing those tasks rather than postponing them to eternity.
Wrapping up
I keep this list handy at any time and when I notice I start getting overwhelmed, it is because I haven't practiced one of these elements throughout the day. It also helps me understand where the feeling is coming from, which in turn allows me to take very specific actions to address it rather than wallow in a vague feeling of overwhelm.
Let me know if you try it xx
Speak next week.