That was basically my worst experience ever over the course of 7 years and I have never personally met anyone who's worked more ours in one week (lol?) but yeah

That was basically my worst experience ever over the course of 7 years and I have never personally met anyone who's worked more ours in one week (lol?) but yeah, any "meaty" meeting is likely to generate a few hundred slides if you include all of the revisions, so it gets out of hand fast. I probably had 5-10 100-hour weeks in any given year, but 70-80 hour weeks would be pretty normal. (I probably also had 4-5 40-hour weeks in any given year, but you usually everyone keeps those on the DL...) Shit compounds when there's a deadweight on the team, or a managing director that doesn't know what they want / has poor planning, or everyone's busy on other projects or the situation is actually complex. In that particular case, it was a combination of a deadweight analyst on a very lean team (I was the only associate, no VP, one very senior director trying to make MD and 2 other super senior MDs... for a $2B M&A deal), poor planning and an actually complex situation (crossborder, post-bankruptcy former public company with public debt still outstanding, multiple tax jurisdictions, CFIUS issues, you name it) leading up to a board meeting on Friday (to which I took a flight to deliver the books, which added to the hours...)