This has been so encouraging to hear that it can be done! The only thing is that I don't think I can do 4-5 hours but more like 2 hour a day for 5-6 months. But boy do you get so pooped out after a long day at work! It's so hard to focus after spending so much time and energy in your professional life. I was wondering, what was your study plan like? Did you do content review simultaneously with practice passages? Also, have you taken biochem?
I totally understand being drained at the end of a long work day! For me, my job drains me in a totally different way than MCAT study did. The mental energy for MCAT studying seemed to come from a different source. It became somewhat ritualized for me...I'd go up to my desk (have a loft office separate from the rest of the house), set up my water bottle and blankets (it was cold up there), put on my special study music, open my books, and...enter a different universe. That really helped, because I'd be almost adrenalized for the duration of my study session. MCAT studying isn't just memorizing facts (there's very little of that, actually). It's a lot of reasoning through novel situations using the concepts that you know, which lights up a totally different part of your brain than normal schoolwork does for me. Sometimes, I'd be so wrapped up that I wouldn't notice how late it had become and basically force myself to close the books and go to bed.
If you're really worried about having the mental focus while maintaining your current work schedule (your work is quite demanding, it seems), it might be worth considering making some changes to your job hours and/or sacrificing income potential during that time. I know that's hard to do, and may or may not be possible given your job situation and/or finances, but the MCAT is one of the main factors that medical schools use to determine your fitness for being a future physician (for better or for worse). Re-examine your situation and assumptions (such as "I MUST make $XX/mo" or "I MUST workout every day for 1.5 hours" or "they will DEFINITELY fire me if I do this") carefully to see what sacrifices you can make. You are likely going to have to give up something, and you don't want that something to be a competitive MCAT score! I reduced workouts to once a week, put all household projects and chores on hold, didn't have a social life to speak of, and dipped into savings in order to make it all work. You not only CAN find a way to carve out time/energy for study, but you HAVE TO if you want to make this dream happen. I, personally, think at 5-6 months you risk forgetting what you studied in the beginning, which is why I'm stressing trying to condense your study schedule.
Speaking of, I followed SN2Ed's 4 month study schedule, which emphasizes a lot of MCAT-style problems coupled with material review. Basically, you do content review for a different subject everyday, but that content review is interspersed with practice problems within the text so your brain is constantly challenged and on alert. Then you do a set of practice problems. The next day, you review the practice problems from the day before and do content review/problems for the next subject. Every day you're supposed to do a handful of verbal passages (I only did verbal on weekends). During the month before your scheduled MCAT, you start doing practice MCATs 2-3x/week, interspersed with a second round of problem sets for everything you've already reviewed.
I took the old MCAT so didn't have biochem/sociology to study for. Couldn't tell you how the new study schedule is, or if SN2Ed has updated his schedule for the new format. You can look here:
http://www.studentdoctor.net/3-month-mcat-study-schedule/
I hope that wasn't too much info... I honestly believe that the higher your MCAT score, the more doors will be opened for you down the road; thus, the lengthy treatise. I wish you the best of luck!
