When Time Beats Money

Most of us track how efficiently we spend money, but we rarely measure how we invest our hours. In today's fast-paced world, optimizing your time creates a genuine competitive edge that money alone can't buy. This is your "Return-on-Time" (ROT) and it can be powerful for unlocking growth and productivity, especially with the increasingly effective AI tools.

Signs Your ROT Needs Attention

• You find yourself saying "I don't have time" for strategic work.

• Your best people spend hours on repetitive tasks that don't leverage their expertise.

• You feel perpetually behind despite working longer hours.

Real-life Scenarios of Poor ROT

• Talent Acquisition and Hiring - Imagine an HR representative who must sift through hundreds of applications to find the qualified talent pool.

• Product Development - Imagine spending four extra months perfecting features, while your competitor released three iterations in that same window, learning and improving with each version. They captured the market while you polished features in isolation.

• Manual repetitive tasks - Imagine spending the entire day on Friday, every single week, generating the weekly report, reinventing the wheel every time.

Three Sample Approaches To Maximize ROT

• Run pre-selection of talent - Prior to applications reaching your HR team, implement a preselection process/assessment through custom autonomous applicant analysis. Programmatically restrict application submissions to candidates who meet the mandatory parameters of your job opening. This creates a win-win situation: job seekers receive immediate feedback on their eligibility, while HR teams can focus on evaluating pre-qualified candidates from an optimized talent pool. It maximizes ROT for everyone involved.

• Run small experiments first - Instead of six-month projects, test core assumptions with two-week sprints. This prevents wasting months on ideas that won't resonate in the real world. Adopt an agile mindset and product development lifecycle, ensuring you see quick wins and build momentum for bigger improvements.

• Start with one automation - Don't overhaul all the processes in your organization at once. If you have a clean data-set, automate your report generation workflow. If not, train an AI bot to recognize your report framework, establish a template, and leverage it to assist you in more rapid and systematized report generation.

Start learning AI in 2025

Keeping up with AI is hard – we get it!

That’s why over 1M professionals read Superhuman AI to stay ahead.

• Get daily AI news, tools, and tutorials

• Learn new AI skills you can use at work in 3 mins a day

• Become 10X more productive

Sign up and start mastering AI