Working more than one job

Multiple jobs turn time tracking from a convenience into a necessity. Two employers means two payslips arriving on different dates, computed from different rates, with nobody but you holding the combined picture.

One job per payer, always

The first decision is where to draw the boundaries, and the rule is simple: create a separate job for every entity that pays you separately. Not per site, not per role, not per manager — per payer.

The reason is that the whole point of the separation is reconciliation. Each job's total has to be comparable against exactly one payslip or one invoice. If you split by site and one employer runs two sites, you have created work for yourself with no benefit. If you merge two employers because the work is similar, you have destroyed the ability to check either.

For freelance work, the same rule reads as one job per client. If a single client pays different rates for different kinds of work — say consulting and implementation — either create two jobs or record the rate on each entry, depending on how your invoices are structured. Match the structure of the record to the structure of the payment.

Rates belong to the job, not to your memory

Each job should carry its own hourly rate from the moment you create it. This sounds obvious and is regularly skipped, on the grounds that you know what each job pays.

You know today. You will not know in fourteen months which of the two rates applied before the April increase. Rate history is the single most annoying thing to reconstruct, and the cheapest thing to record.

When a rate changes, the clean approach is to change it going forward and note the effective date. When you later see a jump in your earnings statistics, the note explains it — otherwise it reads as an error.

Colour-coding is not decoration

With two or more jobs on one calendar, colour is what makes a month legible at a glance. It is also what makes errors visible: a Tuesday that should be blue and is green tells you something was tagged to the wrong employer, and mis-tagged entries are the characteristic failure mode of multi-job tracking. They are invisible in a total and obvious in a colour.

Overlaps and the gaps between jobs

Two things to watch that single-job workers never encounter:

Overlaps. If job A is recorded as ending at 17:00 and job B as starting at 16:30, one of them is wrong. This is usually a template applied without adjustment on a day that ran differently. Overlaps are worth checking for explicitly at the end of each month — they are always an error, which makes them the easiest error to find.

Travel between jobs. Time spent getting from one employer to another is generally not paid by either, but it is time the combination of jobs costs you. Whether you record it is a judgement call. If you are deciding whether a second job is worth keeping, the travel time is part of the answer, and the only way to know it is to have logged it for a month or two.

The combined total is the number nobody else has. Each employer knows their own hours. Only your record knows that the two together came to 58 hours last week. That figure matters for rest periods, for tax thresholds in some countries, for working-time limits where they apply across employments, and for the plain question of whether the arrangement is sustainable.

Reading a multi-job month

Look at the same month three ways, and each tells you something different:

Per job. The reconciliation view. This is what you compare against each payslip, one at a time.
Combined hours. The sustainability view. Total time worked, regardless of who paid for it, including the weeks where two rotas collided.
Combined earnings, with effective rate. Total earnings divided by total hours. This is the number that tells you whether the lower-paid job is actually worth the hours it takes, once you include its travel and its unpaid edges.

That last calculation surprises people. A second job paying noticeably less per hour, with forty minutes of unpaid travel each way, can work out at a fraction of its nominal rate. That might still be the right decision for other reasons — but it should be a decision, not an assumption.

Practical setup

In Working Hours 4b, multi-job tracking works like this: create one job per employer with its own rate and colour; create working profiles per job for the shifts you actually work; filter statistics to a single job when checking a payslip and to all jobs when looking at totals. Tracking more than one job at a time requires a Premium subscription — the free tier covers a single job.

A note on the paperwork

Holding several jobs at once has consequences beyond scheduling — for tax, for benefits entitlement, sometimes for whether combined hours breach a working-time limit that applies across employments rather than per employer. These rules vary enormously by country and this guide cannot tell you how yours work.

What it can say is that every one of those questions is easier to answer with a continuous, per-job record of hours and earnings than without one. That is not the reason to keep the record, but it is a reliable side effect of doing so.