In a related note- has anyone kept a full time job and worked on small remote projects at home at the same time? eg an occasional 20 hours on a weekend. or a few hours per week.
I am doing this now. I work full time and spend another 10 - 20 hours per week doing work for a startup as a contractor. The other contractors I work with are all on opposite side of the world time zones so it's a bit difficult to communicate. I end up working really random hours, 6 - 9PM, 10PM - 1AM. I'm not sure how common this kind of work is but it has been going well so far. I think the key to my situation is that the company is local to me (I live 2 blocks from their office). I only go to the office once or twice a week for a couple hours and I am the only contractor that is local.
I did and do smaller projects now. Last year I worked ft and had a put in 100 hours a month during a contract. It was too much after 6 months plus I had other smaller projects I wanted to keep relations after working with these clients for years.
I want to get something similiar capped around 80 hours a month. I found that position by talking with the founder for a year on angellist after he went through a number of cheaper php employees he needed someone to solidify the code base and add in advanced features. Once that was done he was able to go back to younger and cheaper.
I tried doing it once shortly after I got married. That was a bad idea. I didn't have time for my wife or (step)kids.
I would never do it now, I couldn't squeeze in the time between working full time, exercising, spending time with my family, and just keeping up with technology.
At some point, the marginal utility of extra money doesn't mean that much. I'm by no means rich, but extra money wouldn't change my lifestyle.
I have; it can be tough especially if the client is a demanding one. For me it was more like 10-15 hrs/week, but sometimes it'd easily be 30 hours if things were broken or some new deliverable came up. Luckily my wife had her own thing going on with her Ph.D at the time so she was super supportive and understanding... it also helped that the work covered half the cost of a new car we needed part way through the project.
I wish I could say I found them remotely, but alas these were literally friend-of-a-friend type deals.
More details: One of them was a bakery that was taking all its orders on paper, so I developed a simple but powerful system for them to track their orders in a database, and other was a small investment shop(read: a pair of people managing a millionaire's money) who were looking for a way to track trades and get on with the important stuff rather than waste two hours a day updating an Excel spreadsheet. My biggest problem I haven't been able to leverage these jobs into continuous passive income.
