What is your Return on Time Invested? (ROTI)

ROTI stands for “return on time invested”

What is your return for the time you invest? What has been the return for how you spent your morning? Did you get security by making more progress at work? Did you learn something new? Have your learned some new processes or confronted some fears that will help you grow?

Did you explore new things and enjoyed that exploration?

Return on time invested is a measure of the value or benefit that we receive in return for the time we have invested in a particular activity or task.

How do we evaluate how effective we are in time management? How do we check if the activities we engage (and put effort in) are worth that time and effort? By understanding the return on time invested (ROTI) we get from each of them.

Return might or might not mean “money” or profit derived from a particular work task. It can also simply mean enjoyment that you derived out of doing a specific task. And how well aligned this task felt to your values. Doing some things might add to your bank account, or provide the financial safety net that you need to take care of your living expenses. Doing other things might make you feel alive and make your life worth living.

Sometimes we feel like we’ve been particularly good at doing the things we needed to do to keep the lights on, but our life has become more of an automatic process - there is no joy, we don’t feel like we are really living for ourselves. This is also a ROTI matter, and it generally points in the direction of us spending time more towards security, and not enough towards some other needs and values we have.

We all have needs. And we all have values that we might or might not be aware of. Whenever we act, our mind makes unconscious evaluative judgements about how what we did was “useful” or “not useful”, or even “contrary” from the perspective of our needs and values. This is how we can end up in catch-22 with our time use: doing our best, yet feeling we are not doing the right things, but still not knowing how to change.

For example, one of your values might be to take good care of your children. After a long day at work in which of course you produced money that can be used to take care of your family, you might however feel like you are acting against your taking care of your children value, because you haven’t spent much time being intimate with your family, or building nice relationships to and memories with your children.

And of course, you most likely don’t want to quit producing revenue and just spend time playing with your children, as that would enable you to make nice memories, but would produce a tremendous amount of insecurity (or you might feel deprived of other things you were gaining through adult activities).

This is why being conscious or at least in touch with our own values is important. Some values might act as polar opposites, and drag us in opposite directions. Managing them well is essential to our wellbeing. In the example above, we want to somehow build security and connection, and that’s the only point at which your brain rewards us, so we need to make sure we produce the income to take care of our family, and also build in the time for the connection.

But this can easily get quite complicated, with many goals and subgoals competing for our time, with us only being able to take care of the “big things” and missing out on some of the “little things” that would have made us feel like we have made it, and make our brain reward us for our troubles.

This is why it is important to think of our time more in an investment portofolio way. And make sure various parts of our time investment produce various different returns.

Out of some portions of your time, your ROTI might mean obtaining connection. Out of other portions, our return will be profit. Our of other, personal growth and expansion. Out of other, joy, play, fascination. Out of other, expansion of our family, improvement of our house or household, etc. The way things currently stand, most people are not sure what the return on their time spent even is (for most of their time), let alone make a savvy, optimized investment…

Do you have vast portions of your time that don’t produce any return, or out of which the returns are so minimal that you think of it as “wasted” time?

It is important to understand what do we want to turn our time into, and also to not just stock up on one type of thing, because we are more comfortable at turning our time into that.

For example, perhaps you just know better how to turn your time into profit, but are not sure how to turn it into connection. Left untackled, this will mean you will keep building on your career, and keep being dissatisfied with your connections. What you need here is to be aware that this is a weakness, and try to build a new habit of putting consistently a bit of time into connection, even if at the beginning it might feel like you suck at it.

This is why TimeRichMe challenges encourage you to take one thing you would like to improve from your time expenditure life, and turn that one thing into a habit, by monitoring your own steps in it.

Understanding your normal blind spots, or what are the things that give you returns but easily dropped in front of other pressures, is crucial. Safe-guarding against pressures by monitoring where that we are putting time into forming and maintaining habits that produce our desired returns is crucial for balancing our investment portofolio, and making sure we don’t keep on sucking at something that’s meaningful to us, year after year.

What can this mix of return awareness and habit building do for you?

It enables you to make progress without leaving parts of yourself and your life behind. Without forgetting your body (and ending up with a successful career but 10 kilos more in 5 years time), your family (and ending up with people you provided for that don’t like you or feel like they don’t know you), or with being a performer for a few years but never learning the new tools of the job and ultimately being left behind by the “cool kids” that have adapted and are applying much more effective new tools to do your job.

Applying a ROTI view also makes sure that you take your own wellbeing into account.

Yes, you are producing things with your time. But what of the activities you are doing are playful, enjoyable, make you feel like you are growing, and make you feel you are alive?

To start applying a ROTI driven approach to life you can aim to understand:

• a) your needs
• b) what time activities match your needs
• c) the current “portofolio” of activities your budget holds (versus your current needs).
• d) changing that portofolio for activities that produce the kind of return (in connection, joy, money, insight) that you would love to have.

You can also take it step by step, and just start one challenge that is connected to returns you are interested in seeing.

Interested in better self care, wellbeing and being in shape as a return? Try Exercise, Meditate or any other self-care mission.

Interested in better clarity or more insight into your life? Try Journaling , Unclaimed Walk or the other missions from the Time to think goal.

Interested in more connection as a return? Depending on your specific situation or needs, try Quality Family Time, Teach your Child , Time with Friends, etc

Interested in adding more exploration and adventure into your life? Dream activity, New place in the city, New food, Trip time

Other missions address returns of more organization, fueling passion and creativity, making time for yourself or time management habits that let you relax more.

What would you like as a return from your time?