Start by adding every income stream as its own card. A name, a type, a rate, hours per week — nothing combined into one lump number, because a delivery gig and a design client don’t behave the same way once you’re juggling both.

The next decision happens inside the type selector. Switching a card between Gig, Client Work, Passive, and Teaching changes nothing about the income itself, but it quietly rewrites how that card reacts to everything else you add. Set something to Gig and it will dilute fastest as the stack grows. Set it to Passive and it barely flinches.

Once at least two cards exist, the curve starts moving

The cards get ranked by hourly rate the moment there’s more than one. Whichever pays the most runs at full strength — that’s the line sitting at 100% on the left of the curve. Every card after it drops, and how far depends on its type and on how many total hours you’ve already piled into the week. Hover any point on the curve and a small dark tooltip shows the before-and-after rate for that specific hustle, rather than making you guess from the chart alone. A card that bends sharply downward is almost always one of two things: it’s stacked on top of an already-full week, or it’s set to Gig, the type with the steepest dilution curve of the four. Pulling the sensitivity slider to its lowest setting isolates which of the two is doing the damage — if the bend barely changes, it’s the hours, not the model.

The sensitivity slider above the cards bends that curve. Push it toward “multitasking monster” and the drop softens. Push it toward “need 3 days to switch” and the same stack suddenly looks a lot worse. Nothing about your hustles changes — only how harshly the math treats your particular relationship with context-switching.

Below the chart, the hours nobody’s paying for

The Weekly Time Budget bar adds a grey segment after your paid hours. That’s admin time — invoices, messages, scheduling, tax bookkeeping — sized by how many active streams you’re running and what type they are. Client Work adds the most because clients expect replies. It gets folded into the total time your stack costs you, even though none of it shows up as income. That estimate stays as a single grey block rather than splitting into invented sub-categories for email, taxes, or scheduling, because that level of detail isn’t something the card inputs capture — breaking it apart would look more precise without actually being more accurate.

What the badges on each card are telling you

Once the numbers run, every card gets an Efficiency percentage — what’s left of its rate after dilution. Drop below 60% and the number turns red, a flag that this stream is losing nearly half its value just from sharing your attention. Whichever card pays the most also picks up a Best Focus badge: that’s the one the comparison below uses as the alternative to your current stack. Raise another card’s rate past it, and the badge moves there instantly, recalculated the moment the numbers change rather than waiting for a fresh pass.

The comparison panel: your stack against one focus

This is the number the whole tool is built around. It takes the same block of time — paid hours plus the grey admin time — and asks what it would be worth if all of it went into the Best Focus card instead. Two numbers sit side by side, and most of the time the focused one wins, because a single stream doesn’t pay the dilution tax a stacked one does.

Right under those numbers is a toggle: Unlimited demand or Realistic capacity. The first assumes your best hustle could absorb every hour you’ve got — useful for seeing the theoretical ceiling. Switch to Realistic capacity and set a cap (one client genuinely can’t give you 40 hours a week), and the comparison gets honest: hours beyond that cap simply go unused in the single-focus scenario, which sometimes flips the result and your current stack wins. The cap is the one number the calculator can’t set for you — it has no way to know a specific client’s real ceiling, so it has to be whatever that hustle could genuinely absorb in your actual situation. Removing a card from the stack doesn’t automatically move this comparison either way: if the card you dropped was largely covering its own hours without dragging the others down much, losing it just removes income without freeing up enough dilution to compensate. It moves the most when the card removed was also the Biggest Drag below.

Reading the health line and the leak list

Healthy Stack, Losing Momentum, or Attention Overloaded isn’t a separate calculation — it’s the same stack-versus-focus gap translated into a phrase you don’t have to do math to understand. Underneath it, Where the Money Leaks names names: each card that’s losing value to dilution is listed with its own weekly dollar figure, and the worst offender gets called out as the Biggest Drag so you’re not left scanning a list to find it.

The one thing only you can judge

The calculator can size dilution, admin time, and a realistic hours cap. It can’t tell you whether you enjoy one hustle more than another, how stable each income actually is month to month, or whether one of your cards is a slow-building bet — a new blog, an early YouTube channel — that isn’t supposed to pay well yet. A weak Efficiency score on something brand new isn’t a verdict on it; everything past this point is a judgment call that belongs to you, not to the math.