The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: dafoe1999 on February 19, 2016, 09:58:40 AM
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A lot of days at work I have a lot of downtime. I hate wasting time. Does anyone have ideas on what can be done to make extra income while at work?
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I did some freelance writing/blogging during downtime for awhile. Didn't make a lot, but it was interesting work and made the day go by faster. If you are good at it, you can make a couple hundred dollars a month without too much hassle.
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I adjunct teach for a community college. You need a masters and 18 hours in a particular subject area. The downside to this is if work gets really busy for a few weeks, I have to do the classwork at home. I also take surveys, but this amounts to a small amount of money (maybe $10/month, but I only do a couple a week or less). I also follow couponing blogs and sign up for free stuff (like yesterday I got two pretty large travel size shampoos in the mail) and sweepstakes.
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For a while I worked for a small niche service phone company which required me to work every other weekend. I always saw that as a huge perk. When I wasn't busy I surfed the net for coupons, entered sweepstakes, learned all sorts of interesting things on the net, researched plants ...
Did I mention they provided the best Columbian Coffee and a well stocked kitchen - the owner was Columbian and loved his coffee as much as I do.
About two months after I left the company - I received notice that I had won a huge Sony TV, surround sound, DVD, the works, it took me a second to realize this was the result from entering all those sweepstakes on the weekends.
Online surveys and blogging or writing that e-book are all possibilities.
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What type of work do you do? Can you take on additional projects at work? What skills can you teach yourself in your downtime? I believe that learning new things and making new connections will be far more valuable than making a couple of bucks here and there online. It may pay better if you work on your own side projects, but I wouldn't recommend it because you run into a gray area legally and ethically. If you're on your employers clock, they may have a claim on whatever you're doing during the downtime.
My first job out of school was like this and it was extremely difficult for me when I first started. One of my co-workers told me, "the hardest part of this job is not dying of boredom." So what did I do? I started reaching out to other departments to determine what problems that they were having so that I might be able to provide some solutions. This did a couple of things for me.
1. It made me the go-to person even though I was new and inexperienced.
2. It forced me to spend all of the time that was usually downtime, learning new things and gaining a ton of new skills
If I didn't do this, I would probably still be with that co-worker, bored and making about the same as we were back then.