$79 a month may sound expensive if you think you’re buying a month’s worth of capsules and soft gels. You’re not. The packaging is deceiving -- you’re not buying supplements, you’re buying time. You’re buying more minutes of your mind at its focused, productive best. I’ll show you my math for your return on investment and why Goldmind:Focus pencils for pretty much all knowledge workers.

To be honest, most of us aren’t starting from a baseline of doing eight hours of deep work daily. Even after two cups of coffee and my supplement stack down the hatch, I’m lucky to turn half of that time into truly productive thinking. On a normal day, the average person gets 2.8 hours (168 minutes) based on a large sample of device-log data. The question that matters to me, and the people I made Goldmind for, is: how much of that lost time (5.2 hours, 312 minutes) can we reclaim, reliably, every workday? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think anyone can be -- or wants to be -- laser-focused 8 hours a day. But there is room to get more out of the time you’re already dedicating to work.

Here’s how I derived a ballpark on what Goldmind:Focus can do. In research, “effect size” (Cohen’s d) is the standardized gap between active and placebo in standard deviations. By convention, d≈0.2 is small, 0.5 moderate, 0.8 large. To make it intuitive, you can convert d into a correlation-like number: r = d / sqrt(d^2 + 4). r sits between 0 and 1 and works as a practical “strength” dial that gives you a rough expected lift in your target outcome.

The following are estimates based on the best available published data. For phosphatidylserine, Parker et al. ran a double-blind crossover in healthy adults and found a tangible speed gain on serial subtraction. No, they didn’t test “minutes of focus in an 8-hour day” -- that’s virtually impossible in studies like these -- but it’s a reasonable proxy for focused cognition. Taken literally, PS’s effect size is about d≈0.64. There are also PS+omega-3 studies in kids with ADHD (Manor et al.) and in older adults with memory complaints (Vakhapova et al.) that aren’t healthy working adults and show different, often lower, effects. Rather than cherry-picking the best number, I use a midpoint for the PS+omega-3 family at d≈0.40. PS+DHA makes sense in combination because they complement each other: DHA increases PS uptake into neuronal membranes. For EPA, the signal in healthy young adults is small but real: Patan et al. show EPA-rich oil improves global cognitive composites versus placebo at roughly d≈0.25. In youth with ADHD, EPA >500 mg shows higher effects (Chang et al. d≈0.48), but I’m using the conservative number here. Rhodiola shows a small-to-moderate, consistent antifatigue effect with mental-performance benefits under stress; Olsson et al. 2009 (stressed adults; d≈0.46), Spasov et al. 2000 (healthy students during exams; d≈0.34), and Darbinyan et al. 2000 (night-duty physicians; d≈0.55) would argue for higher than I will use, but because these are estimates extracted from imperfect trials, I’ll conservatively take half of the highest calculated d and call Rhodiola’s effect size around d≈0.27.

If you naively sum those three effect sizes, you overcount. So I penalize for possible biological overlap (mechanistically these ingredients appear complementary rather than redundant, but I’m being conservative) using ρ=0.20 and subtract the shared cross-terms before combining (there will be no quiz at the end of this). That overlap-penalized stack yields d≈0.43. Converting to r gives r≈0.211 (roughly a 21% lift). On a 2.8-hour baseline, that’s ~35 extra minutes of usable focus per workday. If that seems overly optimistic, cut it in half to ~18 minutes -- the math still works. And you might be wondering: if PS+DHA gives us about 0.40, and the combination only gives us 0.43, why not just take PS+DHA, or just PS? It’s an insightful critique. Two quick answers: (1) if you just want to take PS, that’s fair; one industry-funded study certainly makes it look like a valuable tool; (2) this “overall” d≈0.43 has been reduced at every step to be as small as possible. If I recalculated with PS+DHA d≈0.40, EPA d≈0.35, Rhodiola d≈0.45, the combined effect size would be d≈0.54 -- and with a less restrictive “diminishing returns” model to combine the effect sizes I’d get d≈0.98. I’ve genuinely tried not to inflate numbers, but all components have positive effects on cognition and I’m taking d≈0.43 to be the floor of the combined effect.

That settled, we can now price the minutes like any other asset. At California’s minimum wage ($16.50/hour), you need ~13 focused minutes/day to break even on $79/month. At office/admin medians ($22.80/hour) it’s ~9–10 minutes. Business/finance medians ($38/hour) clear it at ~6 minutes. Management medians ($58.70/hour) clear it at under 4 minutes. If your time bills at $100/hour, two minutes/day pays for the subscription. Using r≈0.211, 35 minutes/day over 22 workdays is ~13 hours/month of additional focused time. Valued at $16.50/hour, that’s ~$215/month -- about 2.7x the cost. At $38/hour, ~$494 -- roughly 6.3x. At $58.70/hour, ~$763 -- about 9.7x (roughly 870% net ROI). Even with a 50% haircut (~18 minutes/day), it still pencils at ~1.36x (CA min), ~3.1x (business/finance), ~4.8x (management). That’s the time-value only. You might say, “I’m already getting paid whether I’m focused or mindlessly doom-scrolling on TikTok. Why try to get more productive thought from my mind when it only benefits my boss?” Good-ish question.

The real reason to care (beyond the honor of doing your job well): compensation is lumpy. Raises, bonuses, and promotions massively swing long-term financial outcomes. If sustained focus nudges you one performance bracket up, even by a few points, the gain dwarfs a Goldmind subscription. A 3% raise on $120,000 is $3,600/year -- about $300/month -- nearly 4x the monthly cost, every month. If better output pulls a promotion forward by six months on a $20–$30k step, one timing shift wipes out years of supplement spend. None of this is a promise; it’s a way to frame an investment in yourself and your output. Small, positive changes matter over the arc of a career.

Here’s the rule I suggest for Goldmind:Focus: if it isn’t giving you at least 15–20 minutes/day of noticeable focus back after a month -- less than the breakeven at CA’s minimum wage -- cancel. If it does -- and for many it will -- you’ve found a safe, convenient, evidence-based edge that compounds month by month into better output, then better outcomes, then better pay. And it’s certainly worth the cost.

References

Parker AG, et al. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2011;8:16.

Manor I, et al. Eur Psychiatry. 2012;27(5):335–342.

Vakhapova V, et al. Dement Geriatr Cogn Disord. 2010;29(5):467–474.

Patan MJ, et al. Am J Clin Nutr. 2021;114(3):914–924.

Chang JP, et al. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2018;43(3):534–545.

Darbinyan V, et al. Phytomedicine. 2000;7(5):365–371.

Olsson EM, et al. Planta Med. 2009;75(2):105–112.

Spasov AA, et al. Phytomedicine. 2000;7(2):85–89.