I land in Dubai airport after a red-eye flight from Europe, where I was attending Telecom Practice meetings. We share best practices among practitioners and explore various trends and challenges our clients are facing. I race to the "e-gate," where I will manage to go through immigration and enter the country in under 10 seconds!

I reach home; drop off my bag, which usually remains packed for the remainder of the week (with various clothes being dropped in and out); take a quick shower and shave; and spend an hour playing with my 15-month-old son and catching up with my wife.

I leave for work. I use the time on the road to clean up e-mails and make phone calls (high-speed data cards are wonderful). I talk to my teams to plan out the day, schedule client interactions, arrange problem-solving sessions and already engage in thinking through the more challenging issues facing each team.
I arrive at the client's office and meet with the team to go over our key findings and the messages we will be communicating.

And then the client meeting starts. It is a most exciting time where we debate various solutions that the team has been working on for the past few days—pros and cons from multiple points of view are explored at length.

We then have a problem-solving session with the team, including client team members. Based on the outcome of the meeting, we think through how we will prioritise the decisions made. We also start thinking of a topic that cuts across multiple functions and do some problem solving on what the optimal solution could be. Today we are dealing with how to increase the resolution rate of customer complaints.

After this, I hop into a taxi and drive to a neighbouring emirate for another client meeting. In the car, am constantly on the phone or going through presentation material with the objective of refining our proposed solutions.

Team meeting, client meeting, problem-solving sessions. Adrenaline and our creative juices are flowing. These sessions are usually my favourite time of the day where I get the chance to sink my teeth into a challenging problem and think things through with my teams. I am always amazed by the level of insight that comes out of these discussions.

The full McKinsey team then assembles with the results of the past 14-days' "team barometer" to discuss what is going well and what could be improved to have more impact on this engagement and to ensure our team members' development and lifestyle are well managed.

Once that's over, I head back to the office. I stop on the way at Hardee's, where I order a burger, fries and a milkshake (I can feel my waistline expanding by the minute). In the car I call my wife to see how her day is going and catch up on the latest funny expressions or moves of our toddler.

I arrive at the office on Sheikh Zayed Road and start drafting a story line for another client presentation. Get on to a conference call with a team in South America with whom I am collaborating to develop an internal paper (known internally as a Practice Document) on emerging markets strategies in mobile telecommunications.

Once the conference call is over, I get involved with making calls to various people around the world who have expressed an interest in joining one of our projects to ensure we have the right skill fit and that their development needs are aligned with the projects about to start.

I then head back home to catch up with my wife and have dinner together. Straight after, there is a conference call with American colleagues working on a shared global client.

Once I've put down the phone, I either read an interesting book, for instance, about the life of Warren Buffett or Carlos Ghosn, or watch an episode of Lost or 24 with my wife.

Sleep! (No wonder those bags under my eyes never disappear!!)