Emanuele Preda’s Blog

Event Driven or Event Driver?

January 30, 2009 at 6:04 pm | Posted in business, society, thinking, thoughts, time, work | Leave a comment

The week starts, and brings on a whole series of things happening around you. Phone calls, emails, messages via chat or sms, people visiting, anything else that’s coming to you from the outside.

There are only two ways to react, and to handle these external stimuli.

1. Event Driven (the events drive you)

You fit into this category if you adapt with flexibility to everything happening around you, trying with all your efforts to follow that particular direction you yourself deem, at any given moment, more useful, more right, more proper.

Let’s make an example: at the start of a working day you place a series of objectives, you make a small list of activities that you want to do and bring to completion. You put your effort into it, but then you are exposed to a series of external stimuli (all those phone calls, messages, etc). I’m not speaking about personal messages, all of them concern your activity.

You answer, and give each of your interlocutors all the time they ask.

Each time, during these conversations, you place an objective to complete: you want an answer from Dick, an admission from Harry, a payment from Matthew, to enforce a principle with Mark, to motivate Luke, to convince John, to get finally rid of Tomas and so on.

In other words, YOU DEAL IN REAL TIME WITH each given stimulus, in order of appearance. If there are too much of those external stimuli, at the end of the week it’s very likely you did not succeed in completing your list of tasks. You are certain you worked very well: you’ve done a lot of things and you did stay focused at all times on your activities. Easily spending much more time than those traditional 8 working hours.

Your task list keeps growing constantly, and almost always you find yourself doing important things at the very last moment before the deadline is reached. You know very well what fatigue and/or adrenaline is.

You frequently reach the deadline without fully completing your tasks.

It has happened more than once that you couldn’t manage to reach those important goals you’ve set for yourself, because at deadline you just weren’t ready.

Event Driver (you drive the events)

At the beginning of the week the first thing you do is planning.

You read again all the strategical goals you’ve set, which means you’ve written them down. Writing down objectives is the first step in order to reach them: to be sure our brain doesn’t turn the tables on you along the road.

Then you read again the tactics (tactics too have to be written down, for the same reason) and you check your current position towards the goal. Given the time you have at your disposal to get to it, you plan your week accordingly. So you set (write down) the minimum results you are supposed to reach within a week, and accordingly asset in your agenda the necessary activities to reach those goals. You mustn’t fill in all the time available in a day, in order to leave space to accidents (by giving them space they become expected!) and to those routine activities such as answering phone calls or emails, saving for such activities only the appropriate required time – meaning the time you feel is sufficient, but that is also balanced towards the goals you need to reach.

When all this is done, you are in the middle of the proverb “A good start is half the battle”: the week starts, and you receive the same 20 phone calls a day, but you handle them by your tactics. Therefore, to avoid losing concentration, you establish a schedule of your “answering hours”, and to those calling you outside such a schedule you tell without exception to call you back in your answering hours, or you take a note (if you can’t take notes you must not answer incoming calls, or you’ll risk losing all the precious info you’ve been given!).

During your answering hours, since your time is limited, you’ll handle the calls by focusing on those more important, giving such calls more time than others, less important ones. You’ll need to cut straight to the bone and let go of all provocations and all the minor goals. In fact, if you give each of your interlocutors all the time he/she asks, you’ll run out of time before you can answer all the calls. Only in the rarest of cases the phone calls are incoming in order of importance, thus allowing you to reach the most important goals: in all other cases it won’t be so.

You plan, at a different hour of day, an appropriate time to call back those looking for you. This callbacks are to be handled in order of importance, and leaving those less important, where you need to cut it off, for last.

“To cut it off” necessarily means using scissors. End the call, convince the other person, repeat, tell again, on the contrary means not to cut. To cut it off means you say and listen only the necessary minimum, and then you break with a sentence like “I’m sorry, I have a meeting now, I must go, bye, click”. Only this is cutting off, everything else it’s not.

Doing so lets you decide how much time you assign to phone activity and to all those other activities: only by doing so you are in control of your time.

If you are “event driven” all the rest of the world dominates you, and you are slave to many lords.

Only if you are an event driver you own yourself, because you choose who deserves all of your time, who deserves more minutes, who less minutes, and those who deserve only a few seconds of your precious time.

All of this is impossible to do when RECEIVING a call in an UNKNOWN moment and time and when you want to handle it immediately: no human being can ALWAYS BE READY to their best. Only a computer might do so. The only way I know is to concentrate my calls in one (or two) moments during the day, previously planned, when you can recall to memory your objectives, order the important calls first, preset the times, have your eye on the clock. This necessarily means to SEPARATE the moment of RECEIVING the stimulus (phone call, email, fax, sms, a visit, any external event) from the moment you HANDLE that particular stimulus or activity.

The clock is most important. The clock is like a scales: it prevents you from wasting too much of that precious ingredient that is time. The best of all cooks do not approximate, they always use their scales: it’s the only way to cook your recipes always right, and the only way to improve them. Only by measuring your ingredients (time, in our case) you can learn from your experience and decide “next time I’ll try more sugar” and change only that one ingredient in your recipe, to be able to decide if this single change is definitive or you need to change something else too. If you don’t measure, you’ll have no control on the result because you can’t REPRODUCE it.

Not following a list and flying manually is not a symbol of creativity or skill. It symbolizes CAOS, and MENTAL DISARRAY.

As an Event Driver, not only you are able to plan the duration (how much to give), but also the time (when to give), and the best instruments to use (how to give). For example, you can ask other members of the staff to do the part of the work that is their specialization. Or do first what can be done immediately, and afterwards only what you need to do based on the results of previous completed activities.

You also need to determine the moments when you OPERATE: during these moments you need to have your required tools. Particularly, your agenda=calendar and your notepad – gmail for that on the fly stuff, google docs for the more complex – so you don’t lose them ever, have them always available, and what’s more important making them SEARCHABLE, which means you can find what you need any time, anywhere.

Not finding a note when you need it, is exactly the same as never taking that note!

The moments when you are not OPERATIONAL  (because you’re at a course, or a meeting, etc) are to be placed in your agenda as well, which allows you not to overcrowd your day, leaving always the time for managing ordinary activity.  And the appropriate time to recover all the calls from your incoming or missed calls list, before you start your next activity.

This is true for all human activities: there is a small set of ways how to do them, in all other ways they fail. Let’s take agriculture, for example: only by plowing in the right season and, afterwards, by letting the soil rest, milling, sowing, irrigating and treatment, the fruit grows and the field produces more than the seed you’ve sowed. By doing those activities in any other order, the return is drastically less than seeded, if not null. And while the effort may be the same, if not higher (to plow in an inappropriate season is much harder, i.e. when the land is frozen or wet).

There are only a few ways to have results, all other combinations bring useless CAOS.

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There are no alternatives: either you drive the events, or you are driven by them.

And you can be an Event Driver only if you make a distinct choice and apply this method.

And if you wish to work with me, useless to say, you need to be an Event Driver, whatever it is that you do.