Meet the multi-taskers working double time in London

The booming private-tutoring sector means that twentysomething university graduates are supplementing their incomes by teaching 14-year-olds across London. But second jobbing goes much further than that.

Ollie Neveu, a 26-year-old New Zealander, has a more varied employment situation than most. In her early twenties she worked as an accountant. Now her main career is life coaching, as well as writing a self- development book based on her methods, which focus on our relationship with animals. For about two days a week, though, she takes on various jobs via the random errand website Taskrabbit, which ensures she has enough money to live. Her rate is about £25 an hour (which taskers set themselves) and the world is unpredictable.

“I’ve done a lot of personal assistance work for some very wealthy people — so I’ve seen a very different side of London,” she says. “It’s often errands to do with their home or personal life, like I set up a party for a four-year-old, helped organise paperwork, and helped people move house.”

Neveu says she prefers doing different types of work, and likes being able to vary the emphasis. “Some weeks I do less Taskrabbit stuff and more life coaching. I enjoy the flexibility.”

Primary schoolteacher Anna Glarin, 39, works two days a week at a primary school in St John’s Wood and two days a week for the Coin Street Community Builders social enterprise on the Southbank.

“There aren’t enough jobs to go round, so a lot of people pick up a few days of this and a couple of days of that. Personally I’ve done it because I wanted to have variety — it’s by choice.”

She admits it isn’t the same as doing one job all week. “At the moment it is getting a bit too much,” she says “because at this time of year I am writing reports for the kids while doing essays for my course [she studies on Fridays] and meeting deadlines for the social enterprise.” She doesn’t think continuing two demanding jobs is sustainable in the long-run. “With report writing, I can’t do it in two days, so that starts to impact on each other,” she says.

Few have a jobs mix of pleasing hipsterdom to rival Roseanne Woods, 26, who works in TV production during the week, gets up at 7am on Saturday to work on Mini Magoo’s granola cereal stand at Borough Market, and then spends a few hours on Sunday doing comms work for The Natural Retreat, a yoga resort on the Algarve.

“Some weeks it is a bit overwhelming, when they are all being really demanding, but other times it is nice to have different projects to bounce off. You feel like you can have lots of different lives,” she says.

By law, workers can’t be forced to work more than 48 hours a week on average or just over nine-and-a-half hours per working day, apart from in certain sectors such as domestic work, security and the emergency services. The Government website makes it clear that the working time directive, as the law is known, applies to people with more than one job, meaning that workers who go over the limit in total should technically sign an opt-out agreement with their employers.

Undoubtedly, some of London’s hardest workers are those who hold down a job while trying to start a business of their own. Despite the high property and labour costs of setting up a company in London, a record 184,671 businesses were founded in the capital last year, or more than 500 each day. And often their founders endure a transition period of working all hours of the day.

Fiona Flood, whose Gin Tales business sells infused spirits through a website and this summer at festivals, also works as a copywriter. “I have kind of forgotten what weekends are,” she admits. Despite running a growing business, she says doing two kinds of work appeals to her. “I think if you are a creative person you want to be flexible and work at different times.”

Then there’s Sofia Gradoni, who combined working at a Swiss private bank with starting her new bike company Alpini. “I would finish the day job at 6pm and then every evening I would be working until 11 or midnight, and always on weekends, all of Saturday and half of Sunday,” she says. “I did kind of have to tell people that I wouldn’t see them for a while. I wasn’t able to meet for drinks and had to pull out of things.”

She says the temptation for workers in the capital to try their hand at a business is great. “In London, there is huge opportunity for this kind of thing — lots of people who can help you out.”

She says concentrating on two heavy-duty areas of work like that requires “a certain detachment from your social life” and says what she did isn’t encouraged by bosses. “It is extremely frowned upon in finance, to be doing anything else outside the office. Volunteering yes, but in terms of your own personal life, no way.”

Patrick Bennett, 30, works as an oil and gas consultant for about two thirds of his time, and uses the rest to help run Anges de Sucre, the catering business and artisan bakery he owns with his wife. “To do two jobs properly is the real struggle,” he says. “You can find that one suffers and doesn’t get enough attention sometimes, it’s pretty damn stressful.”

He says working across two very different industries is a nice challenge, although “sometimes it’s hard to switch between units of millions of pounds, and a couple of quid”.

Financial lawyer Amelia Slocombe switches between her job, and her business Rock of Feather, which makes baby-safe silicon jewellery. She says some of her best work is done on her hour long train commute and many meetings with her business partner — who lives in a different part of London — are conducted on Skype. “I just have to be very militant about setting aside time in the mornings or the evenings,” she says. “I would say it requires a lot of prioritising, and a lot of compartmentalising.”

Whether its participants are forced into it by low pay and the extortionate costs of the capital, or choose to fill their hours doing more than one type of work, two-job London is a stressful and time-poor place. If more Londoners join the trend, the capital could start to challenge New York on its reputation for sleep deprivation.

@joshi