> 2. anyone can just call me to say hi, chat or rant: https://sonnet.io/posts/hi

Interesting idea. How many have taken you up on this so far, excluding people you already knew? I’d be super anxious about doing this, but it does fun.

Great idea. I booked a rant slot.

I would like to see how it goes and make a post for my website too.

Here's an offer link for HN crowd: https://calendly.com/searchableguy/15min

>https://sonnet.io/posts/hi

This is great, may I use this idea – with credit – please?

You don’t need permission to do something like this for yourself.

That’s fair. I was asking for courtesy.

That is true, although selfishly I'd love to see how they approach it though, so I can learn from them.

Sure! Share a link/tweet when you share it people, I'm curious to see how you'll approach the idea:)

Amazing idea, I wanted to give away 2h of my life on weekly basis before too. Did not go with it as I want more freedom and flexibility.

Was it worth it for you?

It's easier that you think, I get 1-2 calls per month on average. Using Calendly I can ensure that people give me enough notice to prepare. I'll be writing a post about it in the next 1-2 weeks.

In short: yes, I moved from a big city where I felt like home (Shoreditch, London) to a smaller city (Porto), where due to the pandemic I'm still sometimes struggling with the language and meeting new people. Often, when I feel down, I get one of those random calls and end up feeling like I did something useful.

What can happen during those calls? Here's the worst case: the conversation is somewhat dry or boring, we say bye to each other, maybe take some notes, likely never speak again. Has the worst case ever happened? Yes, once, I think, and I didn't feel like I wasted my time. Did I hear a 3 minute rant about tech that ended up being a 2 hour discussion about the weird, beautiful and fascinating life of the person who called me? Also yes!

But, the main reason is not related to covid or any big life decisions, such as moving to a different country. I think that, especially in our lines of work, it's quite hard to feel like what we do impacts other people. Everything's so immaterial/unreal: the person becomes a user, the user becomes a persona. People who call me are generally very open, curious and, for some reason, surprisingly grateful that someone has time to speak to them. And that's really strange because the amount of effort on my side is minimal. I'm grateful that they decided to spend some of their time calling me.