How to find online employment for a person with limited functionality

Maybe a long-shot: Last year I did 15 hrs a week proofreading CS and Engineering journal papers. Got around $300 - $350 per month

- Company 1: https://cactusglobal.com/careers/freelance/

- Company 2: https://proofreading.org/about/careers/

Didn't need a certificate in Proofreading / Editing. You have to test edit a few sample papers to get employed. My backgound: software development (but have a Science degree too from years ago).

The work is remote, flexible (you can decline papers) but *not* highly paid. Also quite hard if you get a poorly written paper. I only did it as a stop-gap.

Also: don't know if GPT has finished this market...

(The below presumes you live in a mid- to high-income economy):

if you only need $300/month, and you can only do 2 hours a day, you're much more likely to find what you need locally by word of mouth (helping people fix their computers, setting up web accounts / etc). An hour or two a week would net you the $300/mo you need. It'll be easier to find that hour locally than on the internet.

making money on the internet doesn't necessarily scale down infinitely, for example you can't spend 6 minutes a day earning 4 dollars very easily; there's a minimum amount of time it takes to talk to people and arrange jobs etc.

I would look locally if I were you.

If it is possible without telling us any more about your conditions than you want us to know, it would help to know what the blocker is that prevents more than 2-3 hours of work per day. Because the answers to the type of work we recommend are going to be different if it is a physical limitation of being up and around vs. a mental limitation based on stress or cognitive endurance, etc. Answers will be different if you need 20 hours of recovery after 2-3 hours vs. 2 hours of recovery.

Back of the envelope... $300 per month is $10 per day. At 2 hr. of work per day it's $5/hr. I don't know your urgency level, but you can trivially make that much on Fiverr by doing small scale work (setting up stuff on servers, developing simple scripts) once you establish yourself a bit.

What have you tried so far?

Not throwing any shade just don't want to be suggesting stuff you've already tried.

I can't promise anything but could you please email me your resume? chris at orgmenta dot com

(or just any info you want to provide. I don't care about resumes themselves, and don't want you to waste your time on it for me)

First off, I want to commend you for reaching out and seeking solutions despite the hurdles you're facing. Your experience in DevOps and Systems Engineering is solid gold, even if you can only dedicate a few hours a day. There are several avenues you could explore to bring in that extra $300 a month without overwhelming yourself.

Considering your background, freelancing or consultancy gigs might be your best bet. Websites like Upwork, Freelancer, or even reaching out to small businesses directly could land you short-term projects or consultations in your field. Your expertise is valuable, so don't hesitate to put it out there!

Did you consider reselling or affiliate? We human spend our time and money on things constantly.

By selling things people actually want there is always money to be made. eBay, Etsy, classifieds & local alternatives.

While selling is kinda predictable you can also avoid handling products and go the affiliate route. Find products you care about, find a way to cheaply promote them, then put together a nice (actually helpful) website, write a few words and fill it with AI text.

A few hundred dollars per month are absolutely doable at 2-3 hours per week once you found things that work for you. So invest the 2-3 a day to find these things.

I would look at it and say this person does something full time but has 2-3 extra hours per day they would like to use to make some extra money.

Tutor CS/SWE students or something you can do with what you have available. Possibly bilingual, translation, or something like that? Cold call companies to make their websites. Find a website that revenue shares for writing articles. Start a social media channel. Bid on government contracts https://sam.gov/content/opportunities

> I'm only able to work about 2-3 hours per days

Is that a hard limit, or are you saying that under normal office hours you can only do 2-3 hours? Eg, could you do a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the evening?

I'm guessing that's not possible but if you could push it to 5-6 hours I suspect you'd have a much easier time at finding employment because then you say you're basically able to do what a full-timer is doing, you'd just need a little extra flexibility in terms of hours worked.

Can you give more details on your background as a DevOps/Systems Engineer? What languages you do know, what experience do you have?

What's the current market like for technically orientated human eyeball verification of daily data intake ?

This may or may not be what the OP was looking for, but at one point it wasn't uncommon to have humans doing QC work on data streams.

Depending on the type of data and the cost of admitting errors it was known to sometimes pay well enough for the amount outlined.

2-3 hours per day is the amount of real work done at most corporate full-time positions, at best.

Have you considered or tried platforms like Upwork? Or is it that the kind of work you’re capable of isn’t in demand on those kinds of platforms?

I’d have thought if you had fairly basic web development skills you could make more than $300/month from somewhere like that?

Start growing your reputation on an online marketplace like upwork. Bid on small projects that don't take long. As your reputation grows, so will your earning ability.

Maybe some customer support? Development of prototypes and non-urgent functions?

With only 2-3hrs of time what can you realistically achieve?

freelance QA/testing?