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ROIT – Return on Invested Time

Maybe you’re like me and you have a love-hate relationship with email…

I’m constantly trying to tame the beast that is my inbox…and when I asked a mentor of mine, who owns multiple companies, how he deals with email, he just laughed…

And his laugh spoke volumes…

But he went on to talk to me about ROIT – Return on Invested Time – and how the performance of this metric ultimately governs how excellent my product or service will become.

“You start by defining your boundaries”, he told me. Here are just a few:

  • Time: What is your optimal time of day to think, to write, to make calls…then create blocks of time on your calendar and treat them as sacred. Following this you put like work into the same time blocks. For example, all calls are done on Friday, and only on Friday. “All work gets its own appointment, much of it locked into the same timeslot every week or month. Because the less flexible time you have, the more productive you are. The more distractions, the less productive.” – Dan Kennedy
  • Email: Which emails can you delegate, which should you delete, and which should you respond to immediately? Once again email belongs in a time block every day. If you are checking email every 10 minutes and answering phone calls on-demand you won’t get anything done.
  • Responsiveness: How quickly do you respond to clients, colleagues, and your boss? The more important the person to your business, the faster you respond. Set limits on response time, such as ‘within 4 hours’, ‘within 24 hours’, etc. and communicate this clearly to your customer.
  • Means of communication: You can dictate how you wish to be communicated to. I prefer email and text messages with short 15-minute phone calls. Tell others the best way to communicate with you. You decide, not them.

The purpose in creating boundaries is so you can have a sustained focus on 1-2 things every day…

If there are too many things occupying your mind, it will be scattered and your work sub-optimal. It’s about being ruthless; it’s about being an assassin with your time and boundaries.

If you don’t, then someone else will dictate your calendar.

Once you have your boundaries and processes set up then they’re on the chopping block every 90 days. It’s not just ‘continuous process improvement’, it’s the fact that you and I keep growing and changing and what worked last quarter may not be the right thing this quarter.

Know where the greatest return is on your time. The more successful you become the higher your skill level must be at saying ‘no’, rather than ‘yes’.

You must keep the main thing, the main thing.