Skillful coaching is important, but a big part of it is simply accountability: knowing that someone will check on your progress at regular intervals and that you need to do some work in between interviews to not look like a fool.
That's the concept behind the "accountability partner": someone who is not an expert into what you're trying to achieve, but who bugs you regularly to make sure you're moving forward.
After searching for "accountability partner as a service" I couldn't find anything other than weird marketing websites that looked more than a little scammy, so I built a simple tool that sends me an email everyday for each task defined in the system, and that lets me record progress by responding to those emails.
The concept is akin to Jerry Seinfeld's productivity hack: "don't break the chain", meaning you need to do something about your craft every day. If you skip a day, the chain breaks and restarts at zero.
The effectiveness of this is surprising; the accountability system can't assess the quality of the work in any way and isn't even a person that I could disappoint, but having to respond to an automated email every day to log my progress and store ideas, etc., pushes me in ways I would never have expected.
I do this with my team with github issues. They get a daily reminder of issues older than 5 days. We are not getting more done, but we are more aware of what needs to be done and close issues that are just a nice to have. Accountability works well with people, unfortunately most companies just say accountability is important but don't put any real process in place to make it happen.
That's the concept behind the "accountability partner": someone who is not an expert into what you're trying to achieve, but who bugs you regularly to make sure you're moving forward.
After searching for "accountability partner as a service" I couldn't find anything other than weird marketing websites that looked more than a little scammy, so I built a simple tool that sends me an email everyday for each task defined in the system, and that lets me record progress by responding to those emails.
The concept is akin to Jerry Seinfeld's productivity hack: "don't break the chain", meaning you need to do something about your craft every day. If you skip a day, the chain breaks and restarts at zero.
The effectiveness of this is surprising; the accountability system can't assess the quality of the work in any way and isn't even a person that I could disappoint, but having to respond to an automated email every day to log my progress and store ideas, etc., pushes me in ways I would never have expected.