Two things happened in the same week and the comparison has stuck with me ever since.

On the Saturday I drove for six hours and ended up, once I was honest about gas and miles, roughly forty dollars better off than when I started. On the Tuesday I spent about twenty-five minutes on the phone and ended up better off by a little more than that, every month, indefinitely.

The Saturday, and Then the Tuesday

The Saturday I have written about elsewhere. Eleven orders, ninety-one miles, a number on the app in the seventies that became something in the forties once I subtracted the parts that are real but invisible.

The Tuesday was not a hustle and did not feel like one. Two recurring charges had been quietly getting larger — the kind that arrive on a statement you scan rather than read. I noticed while doing something else entirely, got annoyed, and made two phone calls.

One of them was a thing we had genuinely stopped using and I cancelled it, which took four minutes and was pure gain. The other was a service I still wanted, where I asked whether that was really the price, and was told after a hold that it was not really the price.

Twenty-five minutes, one hold, no driving.

Comparing Them Honestly, Which Made Me Uncomfortable

Forty dollars for six hours and ninety-one miles is a rate I can live with but would not recommend.

Forty-something dollars a month for twenty-five minutes, once, is not really a rate at all, because the effort does not repeat and the benefit does. There is no arithmetic that makes the Saturday look better, and I sat with that for a while because I had been treating the Saturday as the serious activity and the Tuesday as admin.

The specific thing that got me is that the Saturday was hard and the Tuesday was easy. Not easier — easy. I had avoided those two phone calls for months, and the reason I avoided them was not that they were difficult, it was that they were dull and involved being on hold, whereas driving around at night at least feels like doing something.

I will pick a hard thing that feels like work over an easy thing that feels like paperwork nearly every time, and that preference had been costing me actual money on a monthly basis for the better part of a year.

There is a second difference that took me longer to see. The Saturday produced a number once and then the number was spent. The Tuesday changed a rate, and a rate keeps applying — to this month, and the one after it, and every month I do not have to think about it again. I have spent two years chasing amounts and had barely looked at the handful of rates quietly running underneath all of it.

The Months I Paid for Preferring the Harder Thing

Both charges had been drifting up for a while before I looked. Whatever the total was across those months, it was more than a Saturday of driving, and I earned that Saturday back in the most laborious way available while the leak ran the whole time.

That is the pettiest, most human line in this notebook: I would rather have driven ninety-one miles than spent twenty minutes on hold, and I made that choice repeatedly, without ever framing it as a choice.

"How long has that been going up?" was the reasonable question at home, once I explained, and I did not have a good answer, which was itself the answer.

There is no dignity in this section. I write a site about tracking things carefully and I had two recurring charges quietly escalating on a statement I was looking at every month.

The Twenty Minutes I Now Book Deliberately

Once a quarter I sit down and read a statement properly instead of scanning it. It takes twenty minutes and it is the least enjoyable thing on my calendar.

It has found something almost every time. Not always much. But the hit rate on twenty minutes of reading a statement is better than the hit rate on anything else I do, and it requires no equipment, no gas, and no evening away from the house.

The other change is that I stopped ranking activities by how much they feel like work. That instinct is completely uncorrelated with what they pay, and in my case it appears to be slightly inversely correlated, which is a genuinely annoying thing to have learned about myself.

Six hours and ninety-one miles, or twenty-five minutes and one hold. I keep doing both, and I know which one is the good idea.

Note: Everyday Hustle Jeff is the written side of a digital series. These accounts are composite and dramatized. Any figures are what they were on the day, for one person, and are not a projection, a track record, or advice.