When I was in college, I worked as a cashier. Between customers, my job was basically to stand there and wait, so I kept my textbooks close. Customer walks up, book goes down. Customer leaves, book comes right back out.
I wasn’t making extra money during those little gaps, but I was using time I had already committed to the job to move something else forward.
One of my sons does a modern version of the same thing. He drives for Spark, and sometimes there is a fair amount of sitting around waiting for an order. When he is parked, he often opens his laptop and works on designs for his eBay business.
I suppose you could call that multitasking, but it isn’t really the frantic kind where you’re trying to answer an email, cook dinner and talk on the phone at the same time. He isn’t doing two jobs at once. He is using the dead time created by one job to move another one forward.
And apparently he isn’t the only one.
I found a discussion among delivery drivers on Reddit where one driver was using the waiting time to brush up on computer skills after getting a lead on an IT job. Another was finishing a teaching degree and using the downtime to study and write papers. In another discussion, a delivery driver said he used his phone as a hotspot and worked his regular remote job from his car while waiting for delivery orders. Other drivers mentioned practicing coding and taking online classes.
That is a lot more interesting to me than simply finding another app to run.
My son’s two income streams work very differently. Spark can put money in his pocket today. His eBay work might produce something that sells later, perhaps more than once. One pays for the trip he makes. The other has at least the possibility of continuing to pay after the work is done.
There are plenty of other ways this could work. Someone doing rideshare or delivery might use twenty parked minutes to create an Etsy listing, edit product photos or research something to resell. Someone sitting at a flea market or craft booth during a slow stretch could list inventory online. A pet sitter or self-employed cleaner with a gap between appointments might work on a website, write a listing or answer routine customer messages.
The second activity just has to be easy to stop.
I would not schedule a Zoom call from the Walmart parking lot and hope no Spark order comes through. And obviously none of this happens while you are driving. But writing, designing, listing products, researching, studying and routine computer work can usually survive being interrupted.
I also would not turn this into a campaign to squeeze money out of every spare minute of your life. Sometimes sitting in the car with a cup of coffee and staring through the windshield is exactly what you need.
The useful question is whether your current work has dead time you are already committed to.
You can’t go home. You can’t start a two-hour project. You’re already there, and for the moment, nothing is happening.
Twenty minutes doesn’t sound like much. But five twenty-minute stretches in a week add up to an hour and forty minutes. Ten of them give you more than three hours. That is enough time to create several product listings, work on a design, do some research, study a lesson or make real progress on something you are building.
Maybe the opportunity isn’t always to find more hours to work.
Sometimes it is to notice that a few of the hours you are already spending have room for a second job.
Sources
Reddit, r/grubhubdrivers: How do you all pass the time waiting for orders? View discussion
Reddit, r/GoPuffDrivers: What do you do to pass the time while waiting for orders? View discussion
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