Audrey A McGee

My best friend in my personal and professional life is a fat little pocket notebook I carry around everywhere.

Let’s see, in this one, I have: props lists and notes from tech week for Anne of Green Gables; sermon notes from church; brainstorming sessions for novels; appointment reminders; and a surprise entry from my boyfriend when I was driving and dictating.

But despite the universality, it’s not confusing to me. Having all of my random thoughts in a single place helps me know immediately where to find them, even if I do have to flip a few pages.

This tool was already in place when I was an intern. It was really helpful when I discovered that my audio-processing skills are subpar.

If I’m listening to my lines over and over, then sure, they’re fixed in my memory forever. But give me a set of verbal instructions in one room and I’ll forget them by the time I’ve walked to the next.

Both I and my boss at Taproot learned this when she would follow up on tasks she asked me to do and I thought, “Oh, now I remember.”

I developed a two-pronged system for meetings with her. My notebook, of course, was the first go-to solution. Handwriting tasks and thoughts keep them in my mind a lot better. But sometimes, we would both be in a rush, and I couldn’t write down everything she would say. I started pulling out my phone to voice record her, then listen back to the instructions afterwards.

Things improved when I was aware of my weakness and found a tool that accommodated for it, equipping myself to do the job well.

Two other uses for the notebook:

You get to hang out with a lot of cool people when you’re interning. Executive directors, team leads, people you admire and want to learn from. Cool people have a tendency to drop wisdom at random moments. You gotta keep a notebook on you or else those nuggets are lost forever.

Keeping a more internship-specific notebook is recommended as well as an all-purposes one. My internship thankfully required me to write and reflect every week, and I brought my notebook to staff meetings; yes, people took official notes, but I was recording my own observations of how the company ran and how it grew and changed over time. At the very back of this notebook, I wrote down every single task that I had done during my internship. Being on book for shows, running errands, archiving headshots — it was a confidence booster to see what I’d done, and it continues to help me write my resumes post-internship.

Write the things down. Short-term, long-term. There’s so much to learn in your internship — make sure you have a notebook for it.