Ryan Hogue loathed how much time he spent in northern Virginia traffic. He calculated he spent nearly eight days' worth of time sitting motionless in his car each year.

Life was otherwise good: It was 2016, and Hogue sat next to his best friend every day at his senior web development job. He had a side gig as an adjunct web development professor at his alma mater, George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He was making $117,300 per year, but driving back and forth felt like a waste of time and money, he says.

He started thinking about ways to earn passive income and better optimize this time. That October, he started a dropshipping business, which quickly turned into a print-on-demand company. He later added online courses, one-on-one coaching services and a YouTube channel to his collection of income streams.

Three years in, those streams outpaced his two salaries, so he quit both day jobs in 2020. Last year, Hogue made over $1,600 a day, or roughly $11,400 per week, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

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Hogue, 35, credits his success, largely, to a simple strategy: turning his business into a game for himself. Each day, he'd simply try to earn more money than he did the previous day, he says. At first, he only made a handful of sales per month, equating to roughly $4 in profit per day, so he worked on figuring out how to double that.

"[My friends] would just laugh at me — 'Dude, cool. $8?' — but in my head I knew that I could double that, and double it again," he said during a recent Make It panel at SXSW.

Incremental goals made Hogue feel like he was improving, even if he could only buy an extra McDonald's Big Mac per day. Winning that game each day helped keep him from quitting before his business turned profitable, he says.

He recommends the strategy for anyone else who's trying to get a side hustle off the ground. "The dollars-per-day [mindset] helps you understand what your time is worth," Hogue now tells Make It.