We were just two guys with a dream to flip the burger industry on its head.

 

Just kidding lol. It shouldn't really be any shock, but I built Sir Kadean because I had a genuinely toxic relationship with productivity. Not in the way people usually assume though- I’ve never struggled to be productive. Quite the opposite. I will drive myself straight into the ground with work if I’m not careful.

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Around 2022 I hit a point in my life where, technically speaking, I had achieved what I thought "the goal" was supposed to be. I had just finished my master’s degree, and I finally had a real 9-5 that paid well enough that I didn’t need multiple side jobs.  For the first time I suddenly had something I didn’t really know what to do with: free time. 

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And instead of enjoying my newfound freedom, my brain completely short-circuited. 

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I lost the momentum that had always carried me, and  I really felt the weight of all the years of grind and everything I used work as a distraction from. I didn't just burn out, I fully crashed into the sidewalls and spun out. 

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Recovery from that wasn't a clear path. "Take a break," is what I was told over and over, but that was my exact downfall. Where is the middle ground between working 20-hour days and accidentally sleeping through half of life? How do you keep moving forward without grinding yourself into dust? 

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The answer I landed on was to simply reteach myself the same way I did when I was a kid. This time though, I wouldn't lose the key I had dropped somewhere along the way: having fun with it.

 

I had started working when I was eight years old, and like any other kid at that age, when I faced hard or boring situations, I would daydream my way through them. Luckily, it was a barn I worked in growing up, a very convenient environment for a kid who was obsessed with things like Lord of the Rings. Half the time I was getting through the workday by playing pretend squire or knight or warrior princess in my own head. The chores were still chores, but the framing made them easier.

 

So my mission became figuring out how to have fun in the midst of corporate hell and general adult trials and tribulations. Obviously, as you can guess, I landed on the idea of side quests. Still, the earliest version of this project looked very different. Different name, different structure, a lot less thought behind it. It was basically just me experimenting with ways to interrupt my own habit of nose-to-the-grindstone until the end of time. 

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Eventually, I started posting some of the quests to social media and realized the idea might actually be useful for other people, too.

That realization made me start thinking about it less as a personal experiment and more as something I could build intentionally. My master’s degree is in public health, where I focused on gamification as a tool for behavioral change. I later carried that perspective into my work developing software in health tech, where much of the work revolves around the same questions: how people initiate action, lose momentum, rebuild self-efficacy, and sustain habits over time. Behavioral science research consistently shows that motivation is rarely driven by discipline alone. Factors like autonomy, novelty, visible progress, and small rewards all play a role in helping people engage with difficult tasks and maintain follow-through.

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By 2024, the project became what people recognize now: the name Sir Kadean (a pun on circadian, as most things here cycle in 24 hours), daily side quests, a journal prompt, and (for a while) a daily oracle pull, posted openly on social media. Even though I already had the idea of an app floating in the back of my mind, social media felt like the perfect setup for this project as the posts would just show up in someone’s feed randomly. That randomness mattered in a big way conceptually. In games, side quests appear when you stumble into them, not when your productivity system tells you it’s time. And if my own personal goal was to break up the day with some whimsy, I assumed it would help others in that same way. They’re there when you need them, and not top of mind or a looming task when you don't.

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In the past couple of years, the project has grown a lot. There are weekly heralds now, longer challenges that span months or even a year, trials, lore, and spaces where people can share their own quests and progress. Some people dive all the way in. Others just pick up a quest when they need one. Both approaches are valid as optional engagement has always been the point.

 

What I’m probably most proud of, though, is the community that’s grown here. Every day, people show up to share wins, talk about what they’re dealing with, help each other through challenges, and celebrate progress together. It’s turned into a really beautiful little guild of adventurers. I am endlessly grateful for them all more than my silly little rewards can express, and that's why I always try to push out the best of what I can for the realm.

 

One thing that hasn’t changed is the ethos behind Sir Kadean. When I was struggling, I kept running into systems that claimed to help people but were rigorous or locked behind subscriptions, courses, or tiers. That always felt wrong to me. Side quests in a game don’t work like that. You don't pay an NPC real money to get the tasks. They exist in the world, and you stumble into them.

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The core rule here is simple: anything that actually helps you participate in the questing stays free and accessible. No one gets more “progress” because they paid. Everyone who shows up here is on the same footing. Access matters. Tools that help people function shouldn’t only exist for people who can afford them. That will always be the way in this realm.

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So where does it go from here?

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Building this site was the next step, and here we are tadaaaa. Up until now, everything mostly lived on social media and the newsletter (Herald), which works, but also had its limits. This space lets the project grow a bit— more quests, more tools, more games, more ways for the community to interact, and things like the Realm Marketplace.

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The long-term goal is still an app. I’m slowly working on that in the background, and there will be more to share when the time is right (and the time is very nearly right).

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I also have plans to explore other “worlds” with this idea. The medieval setting is the one that exists right now because it makes the process fun, but the core concept works in a lot of different environments.

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Beyond that, a lot of the direction comes from the community itself. To keep the knight helmet on, I’m mostly here in service to the adventurers of the realm. People suggest things, ask for certain aids, propose community ideas— and I try to build what I can. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it absolutely does not. Trial and error is how this whole thing has grown so far, and I imagine that’s how it will keep growing.

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So, despite what every startup's About page will try to convince you, this isn’t about reinventing productivity or disrupting an industry or anything like that. This project is nothing new, in my opinion. This is about going back to something most of us already knew how to do as kids— making the hard things a little more fun so we could get through them. Turning chores into quests. Waiting for the gold star at the end of a hard school day. Pretending real life villians were dragons.  Imagining the boring parts of the day into something else. And building worlds worth of stories with our friends as we truck along to our future and our goals.

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The spoonful of sugar and all that we forgot along the way as we grew up.

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Sir Kadean is just a way of remembering.