The twenty-four hours before your onsite are about finding ways to maximize your performance. Ideally, you wanna be having one of those days, where elegant code flows effortlessly from your fingertips, and bugs dare not speak your name for fear you'll squash them.
You need to get your mind and body in The Zone™ before you interview, and we've got some simple suggestions to help.
Interviewing sleep deprived could be worse than getting drunk beforehand. Make it your mission to get a full night of sleep, because you want all the brain power you can get.
In fact, try to get two nights of good sleep before interviewing, since sleep debt lasts a few days.
As soon as the sun goes down, put down the practice problems and focus on relaxing. If sleeping isn't your strongest skill, try these sleepytime guidelines:
The most important thing is to not stay up late practicing new or difficult problems. That'll only put your brain on a train to Los Anxiousness. Instead, you should…
To cultivate your confidence, practice questions that you can already solve handily. Sure, feel free to start the day with a new problem, but by the afternoon you should be building momentum with the questions you know best.
Giving yourself a few wins like this helps your brain simulate a stellar session at the whiteboard. You'll go to sleep dreaming of data structures, and you'll wake up with a self-esteem stimulus that makes you stand out in your interview.
Picture the ideal version of your day. It's a positive visualization exercise. This might sound like some hippie shit, but it's something athletes and entrepreneurs do all the time.
Check out our guided meditation that helps you visualize yourself breezing through a full day of onsite interviews. It takes about 12 minutes, and it goes a long way.
If guided meditations aren't your thing, you can do it yourself. Grab a piece of paper and write out everything that'll happen during a successful day of interviews. Here's some inspiration to get you started: