It was a Sunday night in late April and I had four apps open on my phone and one on my laptop and I was sitting at the kitchen table eating cold lo mein from the container because I had been too busy running side hustles to order dinner with a promo code. That is the kind of irony the month kept handing me.

I had decided — not formally, I don't do formal — to actually track what I was doing for a full calendar month. Not a spreadsheet, nothing that clean. Just a notes file on the MacBook, the same battered Notepad document I use for everything, where I wrote down what I did, roughly how long it took, and what hit the account. The idea was to look at it at the end and see if the picture made more sense than it usually does when I'm inside it.

It did not make more sense. But it made a different kind of sense, which is something.

Why I Started Keeping a Running Tab This Particular Month

My brother-in-law called me on a Wednesday afternoon — I know it was Wednesday because I was on a work call I had just muted — and he wanted to tell me about a guy in his neighborhood who had allegedly made four thousand dollars in a single month "just doing gig stuff." He said it like the number was obvious, like it was lying on the sidewalk.

"You're already doing all that anyway," he said. "You should be tracking it. You might be surprised."

I was not surprised in the direction he meant. But the call stuck with me, mostly because I realized I genuinely did not know what a month of this looked like end to end. I had a rough sense of the DoorDash nights. I knew the surveys were small. The AI tools I'd shipped were generating basically nothing that month — one of the two users with any real activity was John, and John is not a revenue stream, John is a friend who finds my tools useful for reasons I try not to examine too closely.

So I started writing things down. Not to build a case for quitting the day job — I have written about why that's not happening and none of what I found this month moved that needle — but just to see the shape of the thing. The day job pays the mortgage. The side stuff pays for the weeks when the mortgage has already been paid and something else breaks anyway.

The Month in Pieces, Which Is the Only Way to Look at It

DoorDash was the anchor, same as always. I did eleven evenings. Not every evening — some nights the kids needed something, some nights I sat down after work and simply could not make myself stand back up. The eleven evenings were real, though. I tracked mileage in the notes file and I tracked time from first pickup to when I parked back in my driveway. The number I wrote down at the end of week three was sixty-three dollars across four evenings, which looked decent until I wrote the gas figure right next to it. I have done this math before and it never improves. The math does not make sense if you are honest about it. I do it anyway because sixty-three dollars minus gas is still more than zero, and some weeks more than zero is the whole goal.

The surveys and beta tests ran in the background. I do those while code is compiling or while I'm waiting for a meeting to start — the ones where I'm not actually presenting, just present. The April total for that category was something like nineteen dollars and one gift card for a streaming service I already subscribe to, which I gave to my oldest, who accepted it without looking up from her tablet. I'm not complaining. Nineteen dollars for time I would have spent staring at a loading bar is fine.

The short-form content was the month's clearest disappointment. I posted four Reels from the car — one in a parking lot outside a strip mall on Zelda Road, two in the driveway, one in a McDonald's drive-through lane which I am slightly embarrassed about in retrospect. One of them got some traction. The other three went exactly nowhere. I have genuinely never figured out the pattern and April did not clarify it. The one that moved was the one I filmed in thirty seconds without thinking about it. The one I actually planned got eleven views, four of which were me checking if it was working.

The Roblox game didn't generate anything meaningful this month in terms of numbers. But I spent two Saturday afternoons on it with my youngest, who had opinions about the sound effects that were very specific and mostly correct. I'm putting that in the ledger as a different column.

The Honest Gas-and-Hours Number for April

Here is the thing about the screenshots people post: they never include the Tuesday night you drove forty minutes to deliver one order to an address that turned out to be a gated community with a broken callbox. That was April 9th. I sat outside that gate for seven minutes, called the number twice, got no answer, eventually left the order at the gate post, and drove home. The app handled it fine. My mood did not.

Time across all activities for the month: I stopped counting at around thirty-eight hours because the number was making me feel a specific way and I needed to stop feeling that way and go to bed. Thirty-eight hours is conservative. It does not count the twenty minutes I spent one morning trying to figure out why my AI tool's API calls were doubling — which turned out to be my own bug, which I had introduced in February and simply not noticed — or the hour I spent on a Sunday reading a forum thread about Roblox monetization that ended with me knowing slightly more and earning nothing different.

I bought a car air freshener in March specifically for the DoorDash nights. I am counting that. It was three dollars and forty-nine cents and it matters to me that it is in the ledger.

The deal-stacking held up the best, proportionally. I spent almost no time on it — it's just a habit at this point, the way I think about what dinner actually costs before I order it — and it quietly saved more than anything else generated. That's the part I find both funny and a little depressing, because it means the best return on my time this month was the time I spent doing nothing except not paying full price.

What the Notes File Actually Said at the End of April

I looked at the whole document on the last day of the month, which was a Thursday, and I had a cup of reheated coffee and I read it like it was someone else's. My first reaction was that it looked like a lot of motion for a modest result. My second reaction was that I already knew that, and I had been doing it anyway, which means the motion is not really about the result.

What I kept: DoorDash, the surveys, the deal habits. What I dropped: the idea that four Reels a month is a content strategy. What I changed: I started being more honest with myself in the notes about when I'm doing something because it might pay off versus when I'm doing it because I don't want to sit still. Those are different things and they produce different kinds of tired.

The brother-in-law called again at the end of the month and asked how the tracking went. I told him it was instructive. He asked if I was surprised. I said yes, a little. He took that as encouragement, which is fine. He has a new thing he wants to tell me about. I'll hear him out. I always do.

John texted me separately to say the tool he uses had a weird error. It was my February bug. I fixed it and did not charge him, because charging John would be the kind of thing that ends a friendship and begins a conspiracy theory, and I don't have the bandwidth for either.

The notes file is still open. I haven't closed it because May has already started and I already have things to add to it, which probably tells you everything the month of April couldn't.

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.