Return on Stress Taken #ROST

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By

Siddhartha Rastogi

This is the time of the year when you just want to take a break. It makes you even lazier and forces you to be inactive rather than pushing you into action.

It’s also an appropriate time to ponder over the year which just went by from your personal perspective and professional one too.

Did you gain something or did you just take stress for nothing?

Who says stress is bad? 

Perhaps Stress increases productivity, Stress increases your capability to deal with situations.

For some, stress clouds clear thinking and forces you to act irrationally and irresponsibly.

Every action has consequences. The question is how will you measure it?

Here comes the use of ROST or Return on Stress Taken. But before we understand the Concept of #ROST we need to understand #ROTI or Return on Time Invested.

#ROTI = Savings generated by spending extra time on the same activity. For example: If you are buying a product from Amazon for INR 500 Rs. You spend 10 mins on Coupondunia to save 20%. Thus you saved 100 Rs in 10 mins. Thus your ROTI is 100*60/10 = 600 Rs Per hour.

#ROST = It is directly linked to the ROTI, Return on Stress Taken is Incremental earnings generated due to heightened stress less earnings lost due to downtime for recovery. For Example: A person work for UBER and he is paid 250 Rs for every ride. After every 5 five rides, he moves in next bracket where he earns 10% (without compounding) more than previous slab from 1st ride itself. He has an average of completing 11 rides in a 24 hour span. But one day he pushes & stresses himself to complete 21 rides in 24 hour span and he earns 7350 Rs instead of 3300 Rs.

Due to extra stress and effort, he slept more for 4 hours and he misses next half day of work. He could only complete 6 rides next day. Thus his #ROST will be = 7350 – 3300 – 1650= 2400. If ROST creates more downtime than your routine productivity, then it’s negative.

Hence Siddhartha Rastogi cautions, “Keep meetings and appraisals as learning and engagement opportunities, else ROST of these interactions will always be negative”

Siddhartha Rastogi

Siddhartha was born to a learned middle class educated family in Semi Urban India. His father was an extremely honest man who because of his honesty had to pay the price in corporate world. Mother is a determined woman who ensured that children are being well taken care off. After a few years of birth, doctors called Siddhartha, a slow child having flat foot. He would fall more than he could walk. Determined mother ensured all therapies for her son to come out strong to fight the world. Siddhartha joined swimming when he was in 6th standard. Seeing other children of his class, he jumped in 10 feet deep pool and learnt swimming on his own, the very same day.

From that day there was no looking back. He topped his city in 12th and went to score highest in his B school exams. During his profession as banker, he became youngest branch manager of a MNC bank managing their biggest wealth branch in the country. There he found love of his life and got married. His love of his life emerged in the form of his daughter who completely changed him for good.

Siddhartha Rastogi is Director for a boutique Investment bank in India.

Siddhartha is a forward looking thinker & writer who has written a book on decision making. 8 Simple steps to effective decision making.

He writes on various social and current issues via his blog and can also be found on twitter.