Hi all! First post ever, how do you stay calm and organized in an IB fire drill? I always end up following the least efficient ways to do things in a fire drill and end up hardcoding, etc., which bites me in the ass later or even within that fire drill.
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After being in a couple high intensity situations I generally consider these two maxims:
“Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast” and “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”
I adjust the second phrase to read like this though: “if you don’t have time to do it right the first time, you definitely don’t have time to do it twice”
I’ve found the fastest way to get things done is to do your best to anticipate where you might need to make adjustments and make those things easy to update, that is, do those things right. Making things dynamic might take an extra couple minutes on the front end, but those minutes save 10x on the back end.
Unfortunately there is no pixie dust to make you clutch. Going to piggyback and add that learning to chunk assignments under pressure is so valuable. Make them smaller strings of one and just win one battle at a time. Over time, this will also help you develop a fire drill “SOP” as you will have the same few mini-processes that help you get through. The reason I bring this up is if you constantly work randomly you won’t actually improve. You need to break the things you are doing during fire drills into mini-processes so you have something to reflect on and improve upon.
Off-topic would be have a set music playlist that gets you in the zone that you reserve for SHTF scenarios, special candy/gum/drinks/food that you associate with a grind, etc. Really, anything you can do you queue up your body/mind that this is not the standard model update. This doesn’t have to be super healthy or anything either. For me, I only ever have Taco Bell during these situations. Sounds stupid, but it’s kind of like a fuck it meal.
Final suggestion is to build rapport with whoever you report to and ask for debriefs after the dust has settled. It makes you look engaged and more importantly they may have some ideas from when they were in your shoes that can help you become more efficient.
Hardcoding is fine if you're in a jam. The trick is to make sure you make it very obvious where the bombs in the model are. Red font/yellow highlight or red highlight, call it out in an adjacent cell instead of comments so that it's visible.
Pretty much this. My company has pretty rigorous color coding for calc vs external excel link vs hardcode vs capital IQ link.
Fire drill models be like:
I'm a little buzzed but I laughed too hard and too long. +1
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