Hand-Written Notes

I can't remember where I was told to send a thank-you note after going to a job interview but it is good advice. Lately I have been looking for some people to join my team and I am more impressed with someone after they send me a note thanking me for their interview. Sometimes it is the important difference between a successful job-seeking candidate and another. So far, all of these thank-you notes have been via e-mail. Perhaps I am showing my age when I remember that these notes should be hand written.

Back in 2003 I found myself looking for a job without much success. I was invited to attend a conference for C-level executives in high-tech companies. The main person putting on the conference was an old family friend and I explained that I would like to attend but could not afford the very high conference fee. The friend understood my situation and allowed me to attend free of charge. I made a number of significant contacts and so I scribbled a hand-written note and dropped it in the mail to my family friend. The day it arrived, I found out that the friend was appreciative that I would take the time to write something down. His comment was something along the lines of how e-mail is great but a hand-written note is more significant and sincere.

Right now my youngest daughter is in North Carolina and very homesick. This is the first time she has been away from home for more than a week or two. I make sure to send her a weekly e-mail and do a good job keeping in contact with her. Two weeks ago she was really depressed and so I made the effort to write her a letter every day. Yes I had to go buy stamps (did you know you can get them from ATM machines? I didn't until I was getting cash one day). Yes it took a lot longer to write out the letters and the spelling is very questionable. It also took longer for them to arrive. However my daughter thanked me for those letters. She is keeping them and re-reads them almost daily. It has also helped with her homesickness and she is doing much better.

I still prefer to use e-mail and hate texting but tolerate it. However every once and a while it is important to sit down and write something out. I think whoever receives the note or letter will overlook any grammar or spelling mistakes as something hand written is much more significant than electronic characters on a screen.

Holy Cow, It Worked!

Yesterday I wrote about constructive procrastination and how I was thinking about solving a problem while I was writing the blog. As soon as I posted the entry, I went to work using some of the ideas I formulated. Ten minutes later my problem was solved and I was moving on to my next project. I should procrastinate more often.

Today there were no problems with my new project. I am reworking something I did a few months ago and took such good notes the first time that I had everything working quickly. I really like having good notes handy.

This brings up the topic of how to best keep notes. Usually I keep a paper notebook. Lately I have found that it is much easier to cut and paste information into an electronic document. It saves a lot of time over writing things down. I can also cut and paste out of the document and into the programs I am using, which saves even more time. Then to make things really easy, I just store all of my notes in a directory called . . . you guessed it, "notes." The name of the file is what the note is about. It really helps to streamline things.

My Tomcat problem took longer than expected to solve. My notes helped me finish my next task quicker than expected. Now I find myself on schedule and ready to begin the next project. I wonder if I can really claim procrastination as a tool that helped me solve a problem?