During the pandemic I suffered from some serious burnout from a programming career that took a major toll on my mental health. Being a few years into a new SWE role, going to the office was a great change of scenery and gave my days a pretty good lift and progression that I found I really missed when remote work became the norm. My employer had outstanding resources for support and my managers all were incredible at looking after my needs, but even with all of that I felt that my personal life story apart from my job was fading away. WFH became work in this room, sleep in that one, eat in that one, etc and my headspace was so consistently occupied with details around the products we were building that I had lost track of the big picture in my life, where I’m going, and what I value and aspire to do as an individual and not as an employee in a large organization.
I really needed someone to follow up and check-in on me for my goals in the music industry, and overall just stay on top of the things that had nothing to do with my career, so I started a service called Upways. Upways is essentially a team of accountability partners who provide recurring, structured 15-minute check-in calls (1 to n times a week) to make sure you are staying on top of your personal goals, tasks, and productivity outside of work. We do this by calling you at set times each week and asking a few simple questions about your stated goals: 1) What did you complete? 2) What prevented you from not completing something? 3) What are you going to do doing next? - all tracked by a shared google doc.
I originally started doing the calls myself since I was so familiar with the check-in format from my day job, and I really just wanted to see if I could earn some money by talking on the phone with other people and providing value instead of programming all day. In time I built out a team of socially-skilled professionals who range from social workers to accountability/relationship coaches with the key hiring criteria being dependability and hands-on experience with structuring and supporting concrete life goals. I’m proud to say that as of today, we’ve helped people stay on task to successfully build careers in painting and music production, repair damaged relationships, prepare for exams, launch podcasts, lose 60+ lbs of excess weight, prepare for interviews, get job offers, write novels, start/expand internet and in-person businesses, and perhaps most relevant of all - write cool software that matters to them.
It’s been an incredible experience doing all of this in just less than a year since starting out, and my aim is to share this service with the highly talented, creative and motivated people on HN who could use another person in their corner when they’re pushing forward on goals that seem to only matter to them. If this sounds useful to you, I encourage you to check us out or ask any questions. Happy to answer any on here on HN or chris@upways.co. Thanks!