Financial Freedom Friday
When it comes to financial freedom, there’s a truth that’s easy to overlook: time is money in business. If you want to build a profitable, sustainable company, it’s not just about managing your cash—it’s about managing your minutes. Every hour you lose to inefficiency or distractions has a financial cost that adds up fast.
When I started working remotely, I began to truly understand just how valuable time is—especially when leadership started pushing for a return to office. First it was one day a week, then eventually a full-time expectation. I crunched the numbers and realized that every extra day I spent getting ready and commuting was costing me about $5,400 a year—and that was before adding gas, wear, and tear on my car.
That was a wake-up call. Time isn’t just something you spend—it’s something you invest. From that point forward, I made a commitment to treat every hour like a line item in my budget. If a task wasn’t making money, saving money, or setting me up to do either, it needed to be rethought or removed.
That’s when I learned one of the most powerful principles in entrepreneurship: Return on Time Invested (ROTI). Just like Return on Investment (ROI) measures the value you get from money spent, ROTI measures the value you get from time spent.
If you want to reach financial freedom faster, improving your ROTI needs to be a priority. Here’s how to start:
1. Categorize Tasks by Revenue Impact
Not all work is created equal. Some tasks directly drive revenue, like launching my Business Launch Assessment, writing SEO blog posts that bring in leads, or setting up paid ad campaigns that grow my email list and customer base. These activities are the engines that move my business forward.
But not everything I do directly impacts the bottom line right away. Tasks like posting updates to social media, formatting blog posts, uploading images, and organizing backend files are necessary, but they don’t immediately generate income.
That’s why I made a conscious shift. When time feels tight, I prioritize the work that drives revenue first. The rest — administrative updates, social scheduling, and behind-the-scenes organization — gets batched into focused work blocks, automated wherever possible with tools like Zoho Campaigns and WooCommerce, or held for delegation when the opportunity makes sense.
2. Set a Dollar Value for Your Time
If you want to protect your time like your bank account, you need to know what your hour is worth.
Let’s say your goal is to earn $120,000 this year. Divide that by 2,000 working hours (a rough full-time equivalent), and your time needs to be worth $60 an hour. If you’re spending an hour on a task that you could outsource for $20, you’re not just wasting time—you’re losing money.
Even before I started making steady sales, I realized that some tasks just weren’t the best use of my time. Video editing, for example, could eat up hours that I could have spent creating new content or building my offers. It wasn’t overly expensive to outsource, and since I only needed it occasionally, it made more sense to delegate it early on.
But once sales started coming in more consistently, I became even more protective of my time. Every hour felt more valuable because I could see the direct connection between how I spent my time and how much money my business made. Tasks that didn’t drive revenue or growth moved further down the list—or off my plate entirely.
When you start thinking this way, it becomes much easier to say no to distractions and low-value tasks.
3. Batch, Automate, and Delegate Low-Value Tasks
Instead of context-switching all day long, group similar low-value tasks together and knock them out in one focused block of time. Batching keeps you from constantly switching gears—and frees up bigger blocks of mental energy for revenue-generating work.
For me, lower-value tasks include things like reviewing outsourced work, drafting instructions to delegate, or following up on deliverables. These tasks still need to be done, but they aren’t high-leverage—so I batch them into focused time blocks where they don’t interrupt my more strategic work.
I also automate as much as possible. I use Zoho CRM functions and workflows, combined with Zoho Campaigns, to handle follow-up emails, onboarding sequences, and coupon creation and delivery. My blog posts are automatically distributed to social media platforms as well, saving me from manual posting. The less I have to touch repetitive processes, the more time I can spend actually growing the business.
Then there are support tasks that deserve to be outsourced to the right people—not because they’re unimportant, but because they require time and attention that’s better spent elsewhere. Formatting blog posts and sourcing images are ideal virtual assistant tasks. Social media management, on the other hand, is a specialized job that can make a huge impact when handled by someone with expertise.
Every hour you reclaim can be reinvested into high-impact activities—or just getting your life back.
Final Thought:
Time is your most limited resource. Money lost can often be earned back. Time lost? It’s gone forever.
The more I treated my time like my cash flow—protecting it, investing it wisely, and being intentional about where it went—the faster I saw real progress in my business.
When you treat your time like money, and guard it just as fiercely, you don’t just work harder—you build smarter. You accelerate your path to financial freedom.
Ready to save even more time and protect your profits?
Grab your copy of The Business Owner’s Guide to Automation. Inside, you’ll discover simple ways to automate everyday tasks, reclaim your time, and build a business that runs more efficiently—without working longer hours.
