If you're good at what you do, you probably realized that you can do your job in far less than forty hours per week.

The problem is as a W2 employee, you probably have lots of non core tasks to do (meetings, proposal work, etc.).

But when you go 1099, you're just expected to do the core job. There is no manager to hover over you and give you extra stuff, so you find yourself with all this free time, even if you still have to be on site with the client.

If you're in this situation, here's what I recommend you do. Take some of that new "free time" and learn a new skill while you're on the job.

I don't just mean a random skill, but one that can help you "level up" in your 1099 career.

On one of my projects, I had lots of free time, so I learned Tableau. That helped me get even more well paying gigs later.

It's better than being bored and just surfing the web all day.

But there's a few criteria you should apply:

First, the skill should be useful to the current job you have. In my case, I built a Tableau dashboard that was used on my current project which the client appreciated. This keeps it "within scope" of your sub-contract.

Second, you should actually be interested in the thing you're learning. I wanted to learn Tableau because it would automate a lot of stuff I found repetitive or tedious. If you're not interested, you'll give up.

Having lots of free time at work seems great, but eventually, you'll get depressed and antsy if you don't feel like you're doing something useful.

Giving yourself some on-the-job training is a great (and potentially lucrative) way to pass the time, especially since you're being paid for it.