Work-Life Balance at McKinsey

This is a really interesting question because it depends on your lens of social life.

Many people argue that they do have one and most of their opinions are reasonable. They claim that connecting with colleagues after work or spending the weekend to visit clients’ home are their social life. They think reading about the industry and do some extra mystery shopping during the weekend are part of their fun activities. There’s nothing wrong about that.

However, in some people’s mind (I am one of them), that’s not “life”. Life is about completely stepping outside of the consulting world. Visiting friends and families … traveling … playing sports … learning an instrument … volunteering for some social projects … There’s so much out there to interact, to learn, and to experience.

With that said, I still think you can still have work life balance at McKinsey, if you really really want it. Toward the end of my career in consulting, I have more and more life. I tried hard and had a very good plan to make it happen. Work-life balance at McKinsey truly exists!

There are 2 key elements of this plan.

The key No. 1 is to manage “work” like a champ, thereby leaving a free space for “life”. Even though consultants have numerous resources under control (support teams, client, data, PD documents), things can be so messed up unless we know how to make the most of it. You can think of all the resources around you, including you, as a factory. Your mission is to ensure the highest efficiency and effectiveness of this factory. You are the last machine in the chain … cleaning up all the messes if something goes wrong. So the better you keep all machine running in sync, the less time and energy your own machine has to work.

The key No.2 is to manage your “life” as you have done with “work”. Make it as efficient and as effective as possible. Yes, given a tiny and fixed amount of time you have left for life, the better you manage it, the more life you can have. Sleeping till noon on the weekend … not having any meet-up schedule ahead with a favorable timeline doesn’t help.

During my McKinsey’s period, I often make scheduling calls to friends and my family during lunch. I book trips and activities far ahead. I always have a book on my phone so whenever my schedule got broken (e.g: friends coming late for a meetup), I have some productive and fun things to do. I take short naps during travel time to clients’ office. I research and apply the best method to maximize the output of those 4-hours sleeps (breathing cycle, mindfulness, etc.). All of these feel really geeky, but they do maximize the amount of “life” I have.