In the ten business days leading up to Christmas Eve and every day since Sunday, January 4, I have either been doing at least one of these a day:
- Being interviewed for a job
- Doing a “take-home assignment” for a job
- Recording a podcast
The trick to staying on top of all this activity is to have good notes at the ready. Ideally, these are hand-written notes and diagrams like the ones pictured above. I find that I remember what I wrote better when I write it out by hand; it’s probably because it’s slower and gives me more time to commit what I’m writing to memory.
I’ve also suspected that the act of forming different letters in the process of handwriting (unlike typing, where every keypress feels the same, and it’s only the location of the key on the keyboard that feels different) helps you remember what you wrote. There’s some research that agrees with my hypothesis.
However, with 14 interviews in December and at least five scheduled for this week, I had a lot of notes to crank out. Writing them all out by hand would be too slow, so I often resorted to the next-best thing: typing them in…
…and printing them out. I could look at a screen, but paper notes allow me to keep my gaze in the general direction of the camera. Using them means that I’m not relying on the keyboard or mouse to go through my notes, and it very clearly shows that I’m not relying on AI during the interview.
These are photos of just a few of the notes I used in my most recent interviews. A lot of my notes include situations that I can cite when answering “behavioral interview” questions — those questions that start with that dreaded phrase, “Tell me about a time when…”