Thanks for sharing, I think everyone gets this same idea once you realize office jobs are ~80% wasted time but to most it seems too outlandish to actually try and do it.

Similar idea: you could get a remote job and only actually work for something like 2h/day. Would you say that is equally feasible?

How did you pick jobs? As in, what criteria did you set and how did you check them?

Yes I agree its feasible. Thats pretty much the situation I was in before I started taking on more.

I was selective in what jobs I took, aside from technical criteria,

1. had to be 100% remote 2. small teams 3. when interviewing, I tried to make sure that the company valued results over anything else. which a lot of remote office companies already are.

I remember when interviewing for a job I didn't take they wanted me to install a program that takes constant screenshots of my system. That obviously was a deal breaker.

Thanks for answering.

> Thats pretty much the situation I was in before I started taking on more.

During that time, if you didn't work, would it have been possible to pursue a completely different activity such as going hiking for example? Or did you have to be "on standby" at home?

Why are you looking for small teams in particular? And how did you make sure that there aren't too many meetings in particular?

Sorry to bother you with so many questions.

I've found distributed teams with members in different timezones already try to minimize meetings and are really good at organizing themselves through email,slack,scrum boards, etc.

This may sound like I got lucky finding companies that work this way, but I dont think it is, all remote companies usually have employees and even founders who want some liberty to organize their schedule and only care if work gets done at the end of the week.

During what are agreed to be my regular work hours I am expected to answer chats, so hiking would not be an option.

When I only had one job I was wasting a lot of time playing bridge online.

I was looking for small teams because I was afraid large companies would have more measures in place to avoid situations like mine.

Interesting to hear this. An acquaintance worked for a big Telco, and one day his director walked up to him, and asked him "why he was idle yesterday". That's how he found out that every one is being monitored. This was not a remote job.

I've had low expectations tech jobs in the past where I could get the results my boss expected with ~10 hours of work a week. The rest was just sitting in the office. And I've had jobs that legit took 40 hours of head-down working (with no horsing around slack time) to barely keep my performance acceptable. I can tell you the "needs 40 hours" jobs did not pay 4x the "needs 10 hours" jobs. It would be tempting to take multiple low expectations jobs if it were allowed by all the jobs' employment agreements.

I completely agree with this.

>I dont believe this is because Im special in any way, I just think people slack off and generally lose too much time at work.

I can't speak for other people, but I think this is highly dependent on the person and job. I know a score of people who put in a solid 50+ hours at one job. Congrats to you if you have found 3 different jobs that require 2 hours/day.

Do you have noncompetes or employment contracts with each company? If so, how did you navigate this?

I don't have noncompetes, and all three jobs deal with software development but in completely different industries. Ethically I wouldn't work for two competing companies.

I agree there are tech jobs that are way more demanding, its true that I may have found good situations. I think theres also some truth to the fact that if you put your phone on do not disturb, and just concentrate on your work you can get a lot done. It also helps that although Im not a particularly talented developer, I do have almost 2 decades of experience so typically its just coding and not much research.

This can be tedious to be honest, but at this point in my life I have a family to take care of, Im prioritizing being a good provider over technical challenges that fulfill me.

I'm on pace to pay off my 20 year mortgage in 3 years. Once I'm debt free I may consider working less and doing something else with my time.

I also have a wife, kids and excercise two hours 6 days a week.

What sort of skills do you need that are more favorable to being able to work several positions? Sys admin, devops, front end, backend, full stack or database? How do you get out of on call for all 3 positions. I'm in awe. Very nice!

I'm full stack, but more specialized in backend and sysadmin.

None of the three positions have on call duties.

Thanks for your answer! I wonder if I wrongly assume sys admin position naturally require you to be on call, server goes down/offline or some other operations issue.

Theres no formal on-call. But we do have monitoring and alerts and if theres an emergency since its a small team we are all expected to help out.

In practice emergencies happen once a year, so Im happy to get out of bed and help out however I can.

At this point, I feel like you should just run a software consulting shop. Time to start outsourcing tasks and hire subcontractors for support so you could pick up even more work.