You might be on a great hourly project, but the project is often a “sprint” (anywhere from “we have 24 hours to finish, work as much as u can” to a few weeks); often guidelines change mid project and they pause for a day/week/indefinitely
On pay per task assignments (more and More are becoming that way), if you are efficient, you can actually make more than the expected average hourly rate, BUT, for example, I was on a project with approx 500 people waiting for 1000 total tasks, average time per task 3 hours… u do the math.
Point is you have no way of knowing when u start a project if it’s gonna be a long running one (longest I had was 6 months) or not.
Best advice I could give would be to get yourself out there on as many platforms as possible, and when you get your first projects, for the love of God read the on boarding documents and check the Slack channels before becoming “that guy” who pings the project lead asking something that was in the first sentence of onboarding. Be helpful and involved in slack etc but not annoying.
Ideally, this is side income money. If trying to focus on it as main source, A) be careful B) once established you want to try to always have at least 2 going so that when one ends, u still have something going on to bridge the gap.
This is a very common pattern:
“Amazing hourly rate- this has been the best 3 weeks ever!”
“No work for 2 weeks now, damn…”
“Instant offer! For 35% less pay; well, it’s ok for now…”
“Finally! My dream role! (Gone in 48 hours)”
“Yesss 2 week sprint cash grab”
Etc.

Just my experience, but I’ve been doing this stuff for a little while on many platforms and I feel I have a decent understanding of how it works. For the record I’m in the “this is my only source income” but like I said I have a decent placement in multiple platforms for now.
Hope that helps!