Aeons ago, I was given a Predictive Index test for a job application. My friend in HR for the company gave me the test before even asking for my resume. I thought it was odd but she said, nobody gets hired if they don’t fit the right quadrant of this testing system, Boss mandate. My confidence was swelling. Of course I’d do well. I can fit in anywhere!
Spongebob smashcut to me an hour later complaining after I didn’t pass. Fine whatever, it’s just months of inadequacy surfacing in the shower or when waking up in the morning. But it comes down to understanding yourself against the instructions. The instructions of the Predictive Index cognitive test state “Answer as many questions correctly out of 50 in twelve minutes that you can.” No penalization for wrong answers, but the idea is to accumulate as many right answers as you can.
Forget about whether you’re a certain personality type, this is about test-taking with abstract puzzle solving, pattern recognition that can easily steal your focus. Don’t you love being penalized for wanting to figure something out? Get caught up in ‘the box pattern light / dark checkered grid question’. Boom, you just lost too many seconds. Fatality.
When I was required to take another P.I. test for a different job, I thought why not try another strategy? This time I deserve to at least see to the end of the questionnaire. Previously, I’m not even sure I got through half of the 50 questions. Let’s do some simple math to ensure we get there. 12 minutes is 720 seconds. I’ve got 50 questions to do, That gives me only 14.4 seconds per question. Yikes, that doesn’t seem like very much. BUT what I really needed was to make sure I was able to get to the faster easier to accumulate wins. Besides, what if all the five-second easy answers were in the back half?
So I want to force myself to push on and abandon the questions that would catch me up. To do that I need to notify myself that each interval of 14.4 seconds has passed. Let’s subtract a little bit just for transition time and cut it to 13 seconds per question. I thought I’d have my son call it out with a timer on my phone. But I decided there are better bonding experiences for the both of us. I couldn’t think of any timer hardware or software that could do a single timer with custom interval notifications. Then I thought, why not see if A.I. can write me a timer that will countdown and beep at me to keep things moving.
I tried first using the Brave browser Leo AI with Llama 3.1. It started with a python script, but I didn’t want something I’d have to run from a terminal. I know a browser can handle a countdown, c’mon. Llama 3.1 was getting me there partially but I really needed a beeping sound. I grabbed a beep sound off youtube, convert the file to .mp3 as a resource.
After about 5 tries, Llama couldn’t make the sound work. So I decided to try Perplexity AI. That’s one of a few go-to platforms for me. And sure enough it spit out a totally decent program with my specifications. I wanted a start button and just a simple reset button. I told it I had the mp3 file already in place. I dumped the resulting HTML into a file and put it to a localhost xampp server.
After I got it working, I then called to my son and showed him what the A.I. was able to make with the prompt. And we went through the code line by line. I was explaining to him how IDs and Classes worked in the HTML display text and how the JavaScript would do the manipulation. Showed him how 1000 = milliseconds = 1 regular second and we identified which lines were doing the heavy lifting. Now THAT is family bonding!
After trying the demo test, I went for it. And sure enough I got through all of the test, got to question 50 and still had 2 minutes to spare. I’m going to leave you in suspense about whether I fit the requirements of the role I was testing for. But helpers like these are great. You might have the gift of focus and problem solving, and if that comes with a time deficit, well then it just means you have to deploy systems thinking to counter it. Give yourself a free sprinting coach sidekick with a stopwatch.