It started because I couldn't sleep and my laptop was already open. The kids were down, the house was quiet, and instead of doing anything sensible I opened a new Google Sheet and titled it Actual Hourly in a font size that felt accusatory even before I typed a single number. I don't know what I was hoping to find. I think I was hoping the math would come out differently than I suspected.

It did not come out differently.

What I built over the next ninety minutes was a simple table: hustle name, hours logged that month, dollars received that month, one column dividing the second by the first. No projections, no best-case scenarios, no "but if I scaled—" anything. Just what actually happened, divided by how long it took. I stared at it for a while. Then I closed the laptop, reheated some coffee, and sat with the specific feeling of a man who has just done something he cannot undo.

The Part Where I Convince Myself the Numbers Were Wrong the First Time

I'd been doing a loose version of this in my head for years. Every time I finished a DoorDash shift, I'd do the mental math on the drive home — usually somewhere between "that was fine" and "I don't want to think about this." The problem with mental math is that it lets you round generously. You forget the fifteen minutes you sat in a parking lot waiting for an order that got cancelled. You forget the gas stop. You remember the decent tip on the third delivery and let it color the whole evening.

John is the one who accidentally pushed me into doing it properly. We were at his place watching something — one of his videos, probably, something about central banks — and I mentioned that I'd had a pretty good week with surveys and a couple of Dash shifts. He looked at me the way he looks at anything he's about to dismantle.

"Good week meaning what, though? Like, what did you actually make per hour? Because I feel like you don't actually know."

He wasn't wrong. I didn't know. I had a ballpark. I had a vibe. I did not have a number. That bothered me for the next three days until I finally sat down and built the sheet. I told myself I was doing it to prove him wrong. That was not what happened.

I'd been meaning to do something like this ever since I wrote about that DoorDash shift I planned around a promo code — where I'd already done the work of tracking one specific evening closely enough to feel the gap between the gross number and the real one. But I'd never pulled the whole picture together at once. I kept them separate on purpose, I think. Compartmentalization is a survival skill.

What the Sheet Said, Which I Am Going to Tell You Without Enjoying It

I went back through my notes — actual Notepad files, timestamped — and reconstructed four weeks of activity as honestly as I could. I counted clock-in to clock-out on Dash shifts including the wait times. I counted the actual minutes I spent on surveys, not the "active" time the apps report, which is a fiction. I counted the hour I spent one Tuesday troubleshooting why one of my Roblox side project files had broken, even though that one barely has revenue to divide anything into.

Then I added gas. Not an estimate — I'd been keeping receipts in the center console out of some half-formed instinct that they mattered. They mattered.

Here's what the columns said, roughly, for that four-week window:

• DoorDash: eleven hours behind the wheel, net of gas, came out to about nine dollars an hour. Some shifts better. One shift I don't want to talk about.
• Surveys and beta tests: scattered across maybe six hours of genuine attention — not the background noise version, the actually-paying-attention version — and the total was thirty-one dollars. Which is fine until you do the division.
• The AI tool I shipped in February: I counted the ongoing support time. Two users. One of them is John. The hourly rate on that one is a philosophical question more than a math one.

The blended number — everything averaged together — was not good. It was specific and it was not good and I'm not going to write it here because I don't want it indexed anywhere near my name. What I will say is that it was lower than I would have told you if you'd asked me to guess, and I already would have guessed low.

I sat there and thought about the fact that I have never quit the day job to do any of this full time, and I felt briefly and sincerely smart about that decision. That feeling lasted about four minutes before I remembered the sheet was still open.

The Real Price of Knowing the Number

The spreadsheet itself cost nothing except the night I built it and the specific low-grade dread I have carried since. That's not nothing.

The more honest cost is what it did to how I feel during a slow shift. Before the sheet, a dead Tuesday on the road was just a dead Tuesday — annoying, forgettable, balanced out by the next one in my head. Now when I'm sitting in a parking lot at 8:47 PM waiting for a pickup that's running late, I am doing live arithmetic. The meter is running in the wrong direction. I know exactly how much that twelve-minute wait is costing the average I'm trying to protect. It has made me worse at sitting still, which is already not my strong suit.

I also made the mistake of showing the sheet to my oldest, who is at the age where they find adult problems genuinely interesting rather than worrying. They looked at the survey row for a long time.

"Dad, that's less than my allowance per hour."

Correct. Accurate. Devastating. Moving on.

The part I didn't anticipate was how the sheet changed my relationship with the deal-stacking habit — because when I added that row, it was the only line that held up without making me wince. Not because the dollar amounts are impressive, they're not, but because the time-per-dollar ratio on a well-stacked promo is genuinely better than driving somewhere and waiting for someone's food. Fifteen minutes of browser tab work for eleven dollars off a grocery order I was buying anyway is a different kind of math than everything else on the sheet. I find this both validating and slightly depressing, because it means my most efficient "hustle" is technically just shopping carefully.

What I Kept, What I Didn't, and Why the Sheet Is Still Open

I did not quit anything. That's the first thing. I looked at every number, felt bad about it, and then the next Friday I took a Dash shift anyway because the week's groceries don't buy themselves and nine dollars an hour is still nine dollars an hour. I'm not going to pretend the sheet gave me some clarity about what to drop. It mostly just gave me a more accurate version of the guilt I was already carrying.

What I did change: I got more honest about the surveys. I'd been counting "time with the app open" as time worked, which is the kind of creative accounting that only works when you're not looking directly at it. Now I only log it when I'm actually answering questions, not when it's running in the background while I'm doing something else. The number got smaller. The number was already small. Now it's just honest-small instead of generous-small.

I also stopped rebuilding the sheet every week. I did it once, I got the number, and now I update it loosely — enough to know if something has gotten dramatically worse, not so often that I'm doing performance reviews on my own Tuesday evenings. There's a version of this habit that becomes its own second job, and I have enough jobs. The rule about quitting on a Tuesday applies to obsessive tracking habits too, I think. Maybe. I'm not sure. I'm still updating the sheet.

The Roblox row I left in even though it barely has numbers. It's there because it's honest, and because the kids and I worked on it together, and because some things on the ledger aren't really about the ledger. I don't know what to do with that mathematically. The column just says what it says.

The sheet is still open in a tab right now, behind this one. I haven't looked at it today. I'll probably look at it tonight when I should be doing something else, and the number will be the same number it was last time, and I'll close the laptop and reheat whatever coffee is left. Some information is useful. Some information just sits there being true at you.

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.