The ROI Trap: When We Expect Too Much From Our Time
A coachee once told me he feels anxious whenever he has to deal with government offices.
Even simple tasks like obtaining a certificate or submitting a form made him uncomfortable. He would procrastinate and even avoid the task.
At first glance, we thought it might be a discomfort or fear of authority. But a deeper look revealed something interesting.
We replayed his experience.
Me: “Run me through what you feel during the experience.”
Coachee: “I go there, wait for hours, then someone says a document is missing. I come back again the next day. So much time wasted.”
Me: “So the anxiety starts even before going?”
Coachee: “Yes. Because the process may waste half my day… maybe more. And there’s no guarantee it gets done.”
Me: “So the discomfort isn’t authority… is it uncertainty around time and outcome?”
He paused and said – “That sounds about right.”
We went deeper.
Me: “What expectation do you carry when you spend time on something?”
He thought for a moment. Then said something that unlocked the whole puzzle.
“If I spend X amount of time… I expect a certain output from it.”
There it was. A quiet ROI expectation for time.
Many of us unconsciously develop this mental model especially in professional environments where we constantly hear:
“Value your time.”
“Maximize productivity.”
“Every hour should count.”
Over time, our brain starts expecting predictable returns for our effort.
Spend time → get result.
But the real world rarely works like that.
Sometimes, a small tool you built leads to a huge impact and accolades.
Sometimes a startup takes years before anything meaningful happens.
Returns are uneven.
When the coachee realized this, he laughed. He had expected the root cause of his anxiety to be some deep fear or trauma. Instead, it was simply a gap in his mental model on time vs ROI.
This got me thinking.
This ROI mindset can quietly become limiting when applied everywhere.
Especially in areas where returns are slow, invisible, or uncertain:
Relationships
Parenting
Building trust
Working on risky projects
These rarely give clear or immediate ROI.
Sometimes the returns come years later.
Sometimes they appear in ways you never expected.
Sometimes they may never show up in measurable ways.
A healthier way to view effort is this:
Instead of asking:
“What is the return on this effort?”
Ask:
“Is this effort aligned with my values and priorities?”
When effort aligns with what truly matters, the need to measure ROI reduces.
And the anxiety around “wasted time” fades.
Takeaways
1. Some anxieties are not emotional problems — they are mental model problems.
2. Expecting predictable ROI from every unit of time creates frustration.
3. Rewards in life arrive unevenly — sometimes quickly, sometimes very slowly.
4. Many meaningful parts of life cannot be evaluated through ROI.
Have you ever discovered that a problem you thought was emotional… was actually just a faulty mental model?
