I think I’ve been making a better go of it recently, but I probably still owe lots of people apologies for what a crappy keeper-in-toucher I’ve been for the past few months years.
I know this sounds like such a cop out but I really do think that nowadays, it’s because of my job.
I spend my days trying to absorb and analyze all the information that’s being thrown at me literally every second of every (eleven hour) work day. Nowadays that means a good 300-500 bloomberg messages, most of which I should, in a world where there are 48 hours in a day, be opening up, reading and clarifying what I don’t understand.
Since I’m the most junior person who shares the phone line (between three teams or a total of ten other people) I pick up a pretty decent chunk of the calls that come in and filter them to the right people or help if I can.
I also get anywhere from 30-100 emails per day, a lot of which contain research/commentaries I should be reading. Pages and pages of research/commentaries that take me 10x longer than normal to read. Because they’re full of acronyms and terminology that you can’t even really google because they’re so frickin’ industry specific.
I’ve recently been added to a few chat groups with clients/traders that I need to pay closer attention to because time sensitive information goes into those as well.Â
And those are actually just supposed to be the basics of what I do. The sports analogy (those are popular in an office full of dudes) is that, that stuff is the “defense.” Beyond that I’m supposed to be starting to play some “offense,” i.e. running bonds, learning how to stress them, learning how clients look at them, learning how to play with the various analytic tools. Constantly watching all the markets and making sure I understand how they intersect (e.g. the mortgage market is fundamentally tied to the treasury market so how would a certain event in the treasury market affect mortgages). Reaching out to traders and asking them for market color, thoughts, interesting bonds, etc…
Do you see what I mean about being crushed with information? This is why I can’t really get myself to log into FB anymore. At the end of the day, I don’t really want to filter through posts or pictures, it’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that I don’t care by 3pm. Same with email. Especially since I can’t check gmail or FB at work (and I think I’m the last person in the world without a smartphone, I LIKE my flip phone dammit! although I will probably succumb to the iPhone in feb) it makes it so easy to just not do it at all.
Oh and the phone? Well now that we have two-levels, I tend to just leave it wherever I’m not…And I check voicemails about once a month.
Yes, I’m bad. Horrible. Terrible.
I can’t believe there are people who still even bother with me. Unsurprisingly, there are certainly some who have given up. I really can’t blame them as I’m clearly a crappy friend.
It’s just that as accessible as I have to be to everyone all the time (senior sales people, clients, traders, other parts of the firm…) it’s so tempting to disengage whenever I can. To finally be able to avoid calls if I don’t feel like talking. Or not reply to an email right away if I don’t know what to say at that moment. Those are luxuries I don’t really have for a large majority of the hours I’m awake, five days a week.Â
I know it doesn’t mean that I should be taking that out on my friends, i.e. the people who care about me.Â
I just need to find some kind of balance. Which is difficult since I don’t think that’s something I’ve ever had at any point in my life.
Oh yeah, and I really am sorry for being such a shitty friend. I’m working on it, I swear.