Most side hustles are rubbish

Some tasks are not worth your time

Side hustles are a necessary evil in my household because my dog has a healthy appetite! Picture: Paola Bassanese

I have written about side hustles before. If you need to earn extra money in your spare time, you are making a trade off where you are exchanging what would have been your free time for potentially more cash. With time being a precious commodity, my message here is that you need to put a high value to your spare time.

Many side hustles are very tedious

Unless you are planning to retrain in a new skill and start a new career, maybe enrol in courses including getting a degree, having a side hustle should not require you to invest too many hours learning something new to complete a task.

I am assuming that we are all on the same page and we are looking at side hustles as work you can do remotely from home.

I would say that, before even applying for remote roles to earn extra cash, it’s worth comparing what different websites will offer you in exchange for your time.

If there is a low barrier to entry, for example if a side hustle website does not have an entry exam to evaluate the quality of your work in advance, then you may find that the pay rate could be very low and competition for tasks to be too high, which means you may be unlikely to complete a project and get paid for it because someone took the opportunity before you.

For example, when I did some remote work through websites such as Fiverr and Peopleperhour you had to compete with thousands of other candidates and in the majority of cases the winning bid to start working on a project would be the cheapest one.

Clients would value a low hourly rate of pay and a quick turnaround more than the overall qualifications of a candidate. Sometimes expectations from clients would be too unrealistic and, even when you completed a project, you may not get paid and you would then need to escalate the issue with mostly non-existing support teams.

On the opposite end of the scale, websites with strict entry exams and good rates of pay may not have any vacancies for new candidates for several months. For example, at one point there was a lot of talk on social media about a website called Data Annotation that was paying a good hourly rate to train AI, but there were so many people trying to get a gig that, even when they did successfully pass the entry exam, they would not hear back from the company. Promising a pay of $30 an hour and above, the company attracted probably millions of applications around the world. I was curious and I completed the entry exam but I only received an automated reply saying that, due to the volume of requests, the company would be in touch strictly when projects became available. After about six months from my initial exam I received an email offering to sit for another exam to gain access to more opportunities and then I did not hear back.

Don’t get me started on surveys