Extra Income: Decide What It's For Before You Take the Gig

Your typical side hustle makes just enough a month to take the family out for dinner.

It didn't have to stop at dinner money. Some of those people might have built something bigger, or kept their evenings, had they steered with a control system. With the Jirgenson Model, the number could look different.

It's Thursday, ten at night. The day job ended at six. You've been on the second one since eight. Now answer one question: what is this money for? In one number, with a date.

Here is the odd part. You know your rate for the second job to the cent. What the money is for lives in a phrase like "a bit more breathing room".

Extra income needs a job before it needs a gig

The dinner line describes money without a destination. Give yours one tonight.

Andrew, who runs a coffee shop, once wrote his goal as "growth and joy". Then he saw he could never check it. How much growth is enough? At what figure does joy count?

"Some extra income" has the same flaw. Give the goal three things: a number, a unit of measure and a date. "More money" has none of them. "€300 by 1 September" has all three.

What to do: write the goal before you accept the next shift, order or client. Then every extra hour has a yardstick.

How to avoid ending up in the dinner line: never let the work decide what the money is for. Decide first, on a calm evening.

The extra income goal list, filled in

This is the tool: a sheet of paper and a quarter of an hour. Six steps, with Alex's answer under each one.

The entries come from Alex. He is thirteen, and he earns extra money doing odd jobs for the neighbours. Today is 1 May.

1. Write the constraints first

A constraint answers one question: what will I not do, even if it would save the goal? Ask it before you need it.

Alex's constraints: do not borrow money, and do not skip school to earn money. A written prohibition stops a foolish idea faster than any amount of persuasion.

2. List everything you want, nine items at most

Write every wish, not only the money. Time, family, health and rest belong on the list too. Your own time is the area most often forgotten.

Alex has three wishes. A €300 bicycle by 1 September. Football twice a week. His games console, as much as he likes.

Every evening on the console is an evening without paid work.

3. Run the refusal test

Suppose you lose half your free time and must drop wishes one by one. Cross out the first to go, then the next. Number them in reverse: the survivor is number one.

At first Alex wanted to keep the games too. Then he worked it out. The football camp starts in June and leaves him two free evenings a week for everything. The choice became easy. Games go first, football second. The bicycle stays until last, so it gets number one.

4. Give every goal a number

Here is Alex's finished list:

1. Bicycle fund: €300 by 1 September.
2. Football: twice a week.
3. Games: no more than 10 hours a week.

Look at row three. Games didn't vanish. They got a cap, and the cap freed evenings for the fund.

5. Fill six fields for goal number one

A goal turns real once six fields hold an entry.

6. Keep the methods off the list

Odd jobs, pocket money and selling his scooter are ways to reach the fund. They are not goals. They answer "how", and the goal answers "what". Write a method into the list, and you commit to one road before you have seen the map.

That is the whole tool: constraints, nine goals at most, an order, a number on every row, six fields for the top goal, no methods. An order Alex can stick to beats one the adults would approve of.

Delivery driver pay and gig economy pay: write the minimum first

Nine out of ten app drivers in Seattle took home less than minimum wage after costs.

That number didn't have to include all of them. With a minimum line on paper, some drivers might have seen the gap in month one and chosen another road.

The goal list has four layers. Constraints come first. Then the minimum acceptable level: the line below which the result is no longer worth having. Then the improvement goals, in refusal order. Last, a rule for sharing out what time and money remain.

The minimum is the layer gig work skips. So write it before the first shift: the least you will accept per hour, after every cost of earning it. Put "the most I can carry" under constraints, too. Tired driving at midnight is a safety question, not a goal you trade away.

How to avoid working below the line without knowing it: measure your pay after costs, then hold it against the minimum you wrote. This side hustle income sheet shows how to get that figure in one evening.

Network marketing income: a goal or a method?

Nearly three out of four people in network marketing lose money or make nothing.

Not everyone behind that line had to lose. With a list that named the goal and the stop, some might have quit while the loss was small.

Start by asking of each item on your list: what for? "Build a team", "sell to friends" and "reach the next rank" are methods. Each one answers "how". None answers "what do I want?" Andrew asked "what for?" of three methods on his draft. They collapsed into two goals already on his list.

Then check the list for typical defects. Goals that cancel each other out. Priorities that change every Monday, so the work never moves towards any of them. A minor goal rescued at the cost of the main one.

Elena, a freelance designer, shows what a sound list does with extra hours. Her normal limit is 35 hours a week. For the three months she spends writing her first online book, she allows herself up to 55. She chose that in advance, and she wrote down when it ends.

How to avoid working for nothing with no end in sight: give every extra hour a time limit, the way Elena did. When the limit arrives, check the number and decide again.

Second income: two ways to say yes

An illustration: one extra offer, two evenings.

Without an order. A new job comes in on a tired Thursday. More money sounds good, so you say yes. A month later the evenings are gone, and the money went nowhere in particular.

With an order. The same offer meets a list you wrote with a clear head. You see which goal it serves and what it costs from the bottom of the list. The answer took you fifteen minutes in May, not five seconds on a tired Thursday.

Andrew pictured the first version in his own shop. With every goal "equally important", a dearer milk bill and a request for a Friday barista would each get a tired yes. Within a month the money would be gone before the time was. His fatigue would have chosen for him.

The goal list opens a loop of six parts: goal, state, error, levers, plan, forecast. Without the first, the other five have nothing to aim at.

"It's a few gigs, not a company." The test doesn't care about size. Alex runs it on a piggy bank. Emma and Paul run the same model on a family budget.

The Jirgenson Model is scientifically proven to work (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23964934). It is new, so it came too late for the people behind these numbers. It can help with your evenings now.

What extra income without a goal costs

Emma and Paul earn €4,000 a month. Over one quarter their spending rose to €4,400. Their savings stand at €2,000. Change nothing, and the savings run out in five months. Six months of drifting is one month too many.

They looked at three roads. Cut subscriptions and eating out by €180, and the savings last about nine months. Add a side job bringing in €300 a month, and the €400 deficit becomes a surplus of €80. They chose that road, but began with the cuts alone, to see their effect. The side job came a month later, with its task already written: close the gap.

Alex ran the "change nothing" forecast too. Pocket money alone would give him €120 by the autumn: €180 short of the bicycle.

The human cost is in Emma and Paul's first step. At first, they quarrelled.

What the goal list does not fix

The list tells you what the extra money is for and what you give up first. It treats a symptom: you stop working for a destination you never named.

It doesn't show where each goal stands today, in figures you can trust. Nor does it show how big a shortfall must grow before you drop everything else.

Two steps close that gap:

• The state from measured data. Each number from one named source, counted, not felt. Chapter 2.
• Error and the three zones. Thresholds that mark a shortfall as normal, a warning or an emergency, set in advance. Chapter 4.

Without them, the list tells you where you are going. It can't tell you how far off course you are.

Tonight's choice

You have two choices. Take the next gig because the money sounds good, and find out in six months where it went. Or spend fifteen minutes tonight and give the money a job.

The list gives the destination. The measured state and the zones show how far off course you are.

Start with the free part: the Introduction and Chapter 1, where the refusal test is taught in full. If it works for you, get the full control system on Kindle: Steer, Don't Guess on Amazon. It comes as a book, with a short task in every chapter.

Published research

It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works. The published experiment, its record and its data:

• Zenodo (DOI): 10.5281/zenodo.23964934
• Hugging Face: E5 Jirgenson Model blind test
• Kaggle: E5 blind test dataset
• GitHub: experiment folder
• Wikidata: dataset Q142022866, author Q141981336
• ORCID: 0009-0001-3034-3552