On... Time ROI

Last blog, I wrote about Time Management. One thing that stood out to me when planning my time, was time ROI. 

In Finance, we always talk about ROI in terms of monetary value. But money = time. So, in fact when we manage our time, we should consider ROI because we don't want to spend time on things that have low returns (or no returns in some case).

So, what's time ROI? To me, good time ROI is spending time on things that have good returns. I started to realize this when I started to do a bit of time management and there was just so many things to do. And there is no possibility of fitting all my activities in a 24 hour time span.

This is a very rough guideline but it is one that works for me. Generally, I divide my time into three buckets - Fun, Rest and Work. Some activities are non negotiable of course, like sleeping which is 6 hours of my day. So, there is only 18 hours left per day that I can use (6 hours is actually too little for me and I plan to increase it in the future).

How do I split my 18 hours? I can't just spend 10 hours on fun. This is where ROI comes in. The activity that has the highest impact will be added into my calendar. For example - watching movie with my wife and kids is high ROI as it ticks the box of Fun, Rest and Work (killing a few birds with one stone). 

Spending a lot of time on Discord on the other hand is low ROI. It ticks the box of Fun and Work. But I realize that Discord is mostly for researching JPEGS and I asked myself "Do I have any alpha on this sector of investing?". The answer is probably not. Yes, I do want to invest in JPEGS but that cannot take priority over trading stocks and crypto where I think my strength is and where I want to focus my time and energy.

Time is limited. Plan wisely and engage in high Time ROI activities.