Lisa WoodruffCEO and founder, Organize 365

How To Get Control Of Your Time?

30 Mar 2018 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

2:25

In this motivational monologue, Lisa Woodruff argues that control over one’s time is fundamentally a mindset. She urges viewers to consider the entire 168 hours of a week rather than just the conventional workday, emphasizing that perceiving time as a limited resource limits one’s ability to use it effectively. Woodruff contrasts her own holistic view with her husband Greg’s narrower perspective, which treats non‑work hours solely as recovery time after a fixed 8‑to‑5 job. She shares a personal example of taking unpaid days off when vacation time ran out, framing the decision as a trade‑off between money and valuable personal/family time. Throughout, she stresses the importance of continuously reorganizing one’s schedule to prioritize recovery, family, and meaningful tasks, reinforcing that time is more controllable than many realize.

Chapters

It is a mindset. Like, if you think you are in control of your time, you are. If you think you are not in control of your time, you are not in control of your time. And it doesn't mean that you could do whatever you want whenever you want, but I feel like I am in control of my time. And when I say my time, I mean all 168 hours out of the week, not just the time from 9 to 5 when you would do a traditional day job, or not just the time from 8 in the morning to 8 at night while your children are awake. Some of you would love for your children to go to bed at 8 PM. Start looking at all of your time. Um, I noticed this most prominently with my husband. He works an 8 to 5 job, and then all of the hours that he's not working are his off time. But it never feels like there are enough off hours for the amount of on hours that he has. And he doesn't look at the whole 24 hours in his day. He looks at a workday of working And then trying to recover from work. Not when he gets home at 5, we don't go to bed till 10 or 11. That's 5 hours. You could do a lot of stuff in 5 hours. But his mindset is not, I have 5 hours to do whatever I want with. It's, this is my time to recuperate before I go back to work the next day. So it is definitely a mindset of how you look at your time. I know also, like, um, when I was full-time teaching and we had to take time off of work, Greg and I, and we ran out of time, vacation time, and we had to start taking time that was unpaid. That was never a problem for me. I mean, financially it was a problem, but I often say to Greg, well then just take an unpaid day off. And his mindset cannot compute that. Like, he works however many, uh, weeks a year that he works, and he gets paid whatever he gets paid in his paycheck, and he has X amount of vacation days, period, end of discussion. Like, the thought of taking a day off of work Unpaid is too foreign of a concept for him. For me, if he needs that day for his sanity, for our family, for whatever, you know, it's X amount of dollars. Is X amount of dollars worth all of that extra time? And in some cases, I think the answer is yes, but he always says no. So how are you really looking at your time? Your time really is more in your control than you realize it is. And also, along with not wasting time, I reorganize my time all of the time.