The notification came in at 6:47 a.m. — a breakfast order, two miles from my house, going to an office park on the east side. I was already in the car. Kids were dropped. Coffee was in the cupholder, still hot enough to matter. I had exactly one hour and eight minutes before my team's standup, and I figured I could run one, maybe two deliveries, get home, change shirts, and be on camera looking like a person who had not just handed a bag of biscuits through a car window.

I want to be clear that this plan was fine on paper. On paper it had margins. On paper I was a man who had optimized his morning.

What actually happened is that I showed up to standup at 9:02 with a grease spot on my sleeve, slightly out of breath, and my oldest's Minecraft soundtrack still playing through my laptop speakers because I had grabbed the wrong audio output in a hurry. My manager, Deb, did not say anything. She has the particular patience of someone who has managed remote engineers for a long time and has seen worse. I am probably in her personal highlight reel anyway.

The Logic That Made Sense at 6 a.m.

I'd been doing DoorDash in the evenings for a few weeks — the usual thing, go out after dinner, run a handful of orders, come home smelling like someone else's food. It works, more or less, if you don't think too hard about gas. I try not to think too hard about gas.

The evening windows were getting harder to protect, though. Kids have stuff. There are practices and pickups and one of them went through a phase of needing me to watch a specific YouTube video about cave biomes every single night before bed, which is not a phase I had budgeted for. So I started looking at the morning slot — that gap between school drop-off and standup — like it was untapped territory.

And honestly, it looked good. An hour, maybe ninety minutes on a slow standup day. Breakfast orders are usually short runs. The streets are moving. I'd already burned the gas getting to school anyway, so the marginal cost felt low. I know how that math actually works out when you write it down — I've done it before and it is not flattering — but at 6 a.m. I was not writing anything down. I was just going.

My brother-in-law had actually suggested this months ago, in the way he suggests things, which is enthusiastically and without having tried it himself.

"Bro, mornings are the move. Nobody's doing mornings. You could run like five orders before your first meeting."

I told him I'd think about it. I thought about it for three months and then did it impulsively on a Tuesday.

One Order Became Three and Then the Clock Became a Problem

The first order was genuinely fine. Biscuits and gravy to a guy named Dale at an insurance office. In and out in twenty-two minutes including drive time. I felt like a professional. I felt like a man who had figured something out.

The second order came in almost immediately and I took it without checking the pickup location, which was my mistake. It was at a place I didn't know, tucked into a strip mall off Atlanta Highway that I had to circle twice because the entrance is behind a dry cleaner and there is no signage that makes sense. The food was ready when I got there, which was a mercy, but I was already eight minutes deeper into my buffer than I'd planned.

Then I made the decision that doomed the morning: I accepted a third order. It was close. It looked fast. I want to be on record saying I knew, in the part of my brain that does arithmetic, that I did not have time. I took it anyway because the payout was a little better than the first two and I had already done the math wrong once and was committed to the bit.

I got home at 8:58. The standup invite said 9:00. I had two minutes to get from the driveway to my desk, swap out my jacket, find my laptop, and look like I had been sitting there for a while. I did not swap out the jacket. I just sat down and opened the camera and hoped nobody would notice the sleeve.

Deb noticed. She didn't say anything, but she noticed. I could tell by the slight pause before she moved to the next agenda item. That pause is in my memory now.

Thirty-Seven Dollars and One Sleeve, Accounted For

Three orders, about ninety-four minutes door to door including all the driving and the strip mall loop. Thirty-seven dollars before the app took its share. Gas was probably four dollars and change — I didn't log it precisely, which is a habit I keep failing to fix, and the people in the Facebook groups definitely aren't fixing it either.

The jacket situation cost me nothing financially. It cost me something else. I sat in that standup slightly distracted, half-listening to the sprint review conversation while also running a quiet background process about whether Deb was going to bring it up in our one-on-one. She didn't. But I spent probably forty minutes of billable brain space on that possibility, which is a cost I cannot put in a spreadsheet but also cannot pretend isn't real.

The actual work that morning — the engineering work, the thing the job pays me for — I was slow getting into it. I had the post-delivery restlessness, the low-level adrenaline that comes from driving around and making small decisions fast, and it does not pair well with reading a pull request carefully. I caught myself re-reading the same function three times around 10:15. I'm not blaming DoorDash for that. I'm just noting it happened.

The day job is not a thing I can afford to be half-present for. That is the whole floor. Everything else I do — the deliveries, the tools I build and occasionally ship, whatever my brother-in-law is going to propose next — all of it stands on the job being intact. Thirty-seven dollars does not cover a bad performance review. I don't know what a bad performance review costs exactly, and I don't want to find out, so I won't pretend to do that math here.

What I Kept, What I Capped, and the One-Order Rule I'm Trying

I didn't stop doing morning runs. I probably should have taken a week off and thought about it, but instead I went out again Thursday and it went fine because I only took one order and was back at my desk by 8:30 with enough time to reheat my coffee and pretend I'd been working since eight.

That's the thing I kept: the one-order cap. One order, known pickup location, home by 8:35. If the second notification comes in while I'm on the first delivery, I let it go. This is harder than it sounds because the second notification always sounds easy and fast and like it's on the way. It is never on the way. I know this about myself and I still have to actively choose not to take it every single time.

What I dropped is the idea that the morning slot is secretly more efficient than the evening. It isn't. The evening has its own problems — I've got stuff going on with the kids most nights, and the motivation to go back out after dinner is genuinely lower than it was a year ago — but at least a bad evening delivery doesn't follow me into work. A bad morning delivery sits in the same chair I'm supposed to be coding from.

The sleeve, for the record, was fine. Cold water, ten minutes. I've had worse. But I did spend an embarrassing amount of time checking it during the standup, which is time I could have spent paying attention to what Marcus was saying about the API migration. Sorry, Marcus. I was thinking about biscuit grease.

The morning slot is still there. I still use it, carefully, one order at a time, with one eye on the clock the whole way. It's not a system. It's more like a habit with a hard stop, and the hard stop is the only part that matters. Most mornings I don't go out at all. On the mornings I do, I try to be home before anyone on my team is awake enough to notice the sleeve.

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.