I am currently in the stage of my peculiar procrastination cycle where I am doing everything except the thing I need to do — get a job. Hopefully at some point the anxiety of postponement will become unsustainable. I tell myself that I’m waiting for a flow state but really I’m a bit broken without outside pressure and structure. But broken in a good way.

Typically I end up channelling my anxiety into creating lots of odd things and some of them end up being useful. Most of them don’t make it very far. I have a folder called projects with hundreds of half-started things in it. It’s so bad that often I start something and only when it’s three-quarters done I realise that I’ve already done it.

Occasionally one gets to a completed state, reaches escape velocity and I want to share it.

This week, I made an AI skill to help you/me prepare for job interviews. I’ve helped heaps of people over the years prepare for interviews and I have a pretty good strike rate. Although I once got the feedback: “I didn’t get the job but they said my interview technique was flawless”. Not sure what to make of that.

One mistake comes up again and again, and I think it’s easy to fix: people assume you can’t really prepare for the softer, competency-style questions. You know, the “tell me about a time you…” ones. They treat them as something you either pull off on the day or you don’t. I empathise so hard with this — I am nothing if not a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants person.

But you can prepare for them. If you’ve spent any time in the civil service you’ll know the STAR method — Situation, Task, Action, Result. It’s a simple structure that turns rambling thoughts into a clear, convincing story. The catch is that reading about STAR doesn’t get you far. You have to practise it out loud, against real questions, until it’s second nature. And, hopefully you’ll enter the interview with more confidence.

So I built something to help with that — an AI interview coach that runs inside Claude.
How it works:
→ You give it the link to the job you’re going for
→ It reads the role and asks the questions that interviewer is likely to ask
→ You answer one at a time, and it coaches each one — what worked, one thing to fix, then go again
→ It names the STAR parts as you practise, so by the end, with any luck, you’re structuring your answers without thinking about it

The practice is the point. You have to do the reps.

Here’s a quick taste of it in action — a real exchange, lightly trimmed — of course, it’s not quite the real thing but I think it works:

Coach: Tell me about a time you got a stakeholder on board when you had no authority over them.

You: Oh, this happens all the time as a PM. The key is building good relationships and making sure everyone feels heard. I try to bring people along rather than forcing things, so I’d say I’m generally pretty good at influencing.

Coach: The philosophy is right. But they asked for a time — one specific story — and this is all principles, no actual moment. No Situation, no Action, no Result. A real example beats “I’m generally good at this.” Pick one — a time someone pushed back and you won them over.

You: Okay — last spring I wanted to delay a feature sales had already promised to prospects, because our data showed it’d flop. I sat down with the regional sales lead, showed him usage data from a similar half-baked feature that barely got adopted, and reframed the delay as protecting his credibility. We pushed it six weeks, and adoption came in about double that earlier feature.

Coach: That’s a real story now — you moved him with evidence and by making it about what he cared about, and you quantified the payoff. See how much more that lands than “I’m good at influencing”?

It’s free and open source: https://github.com/techbelly/star-interview-prep Just ask your favourite AI to install it and give them the url.

I know, I know. I should be actually looking for jobs and applying to them instead of building tools to help me do this. If you’re my kind of procrastinator, I recommend the words of honest Abe Lincoln: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

At some point I really need to start chopping though…

Speaking of STAR, here is my own real-life example of the procrastination cycle, framed by the method:

  • Situation: My career break has come to an end
  • Task: I need to find a job pronto
  • Action: I made an AI tool to help me in interviews
  • Result: I have an AI tool but no job

Hope you find this useful. Let me know if it helps. Give me a star on github, improve it for everyone or share it with someone else.