The pandemic introduced remote work or teleworking and it seems that in many professions it has come to stay, also in Spain. The fact of being able to work from anywhere in the world without having to waste time physically going to the office allows many advantages that some people have begun to make the most of.
It has long been known that people are combining multiple remote jobs without their companies knowing. These are people who are able to optimize their work time more and, consequently, earn much more money. However, this entails spending many hours in front of the computer and ends up creating stress due to the large volume of work that is generated.
The American publication Business Insider has explained the case of Joseph, a computer engineer who combines three jobs at the same time. According to his testimony, the key is that he is much more efficient than his office mates and finishes his tasks earlier, which allows him to fill his ‘dead hours’ with other jobs. In addition, Artificial Intelligence applied to chatbots like ChatGPT has helped him to be much more productive.
This 48-year-old man who lives in Texas (United States) has tripled his income in the last year. According to documents obtained by Insider, he has entered more than 300,000 euros. The funny thing is that each job is full time (8 hours a day) and nobody can spend 24 hours a day working. The trick is that, although his bosses estimate a full-time schedule to carry out his tasks, he can do it in much fewer hours than his contract dictates.
Although Joseph admits the stress is getting to him and he’s not sure how much longer he’ll be able to keep up this pace of work, he says the extra income makes a big difference for his family: he’s paid off his mortgage and already has savings to send his kids to school. university. So he plans to continue like this until his body and head can take it.
In 2020, Joseph had a job that paid him $117,500 annually. However, since he needed very little time in his workday to perform his tasks, he decided to accept a new remote position in the computer science field with a salary of $120,000. At the time, Joseph claims that he only worked an actual four to five hours a week in his position, even though the company ‘required’ him to work full time.
On paper, the second job required an additional 30 to 40 hours of work a week. However, due to a strategic change in the company that he did not like, Joseph decided to look for a third job. If he liked this new job, he would leave the second job. However, when he accepted his third job in February 2022, also as a computer scientist, and which paid him $120,000 a year, the actual working hours at his second job dropped from 30-40 hours a week to just five to eight hours, with the same salary.
Therefore, Joseph decided to juggle all three jobs at the same time, and he succeeded. Currently, he claims that he works about 40 hours a week at all three of his jobs, putting in a few extra hours two or three nights a week. According to Joseph: “In the IT world, we never work just 40 hours a week. I’m a salaried employee, so it doesn’t really matter if I work 15 or 40 hours a week, if I do the job I was hired to do , then I deserve my salary.”
To be able to combine the three jobs that he carries out, Joseph needs a great organization of his time. However, that does not prevent some problems from arising, which he has to solve on the fly.
Stress is the main one, since many times the tasks that he has to carry out overlap and he has to work extra to solve it. When he has simultaneous meetings at multiple jobs, for example, Joseph uses the digital calendar from his first job, where he adds all meetings or obligations and labels them “private” so no one can see what they’re about. This helps you avoid interruptions during those periods, although it is not always effective.
At times, he admits that he attends several meetings at the same time without paying much attention to them. He turns off the camera and plugs in the headphones, listening to a bit of each of them.
In the United States, there are no federal or state laws that prohibit having two jobs simultaneously, but the employee may be in violation of some employment contracts, which could lead to his dismissal.
Joseph explains that one of the reasons why he does not want to leave any of his jobs, despite feeling “burned out”, is because he is worried about the future and seeks financial stability so that his children can go to university and secure their retirement. . His standard of living in terms of quality has taken an important leap. In little more than a year, he has managed to pay the rest of his mortgage, buy a car for himself and another for his son, and also pay for his university studies.
In addition, he considers that due to the current economic situation and the crisis that exists, he would not be surprised to be fired from two of his jobs. Therefore, the lack of stability leads him not to risk leaving one of them in order not to slow down his life and continue saving for tomorrow.
