Every day we must balance the often overwhelming demands of personal and professional life. We are all looking to improve our productivity and learn tips, tricks and methods that work for us. We recently kicked off our “Productivity School” series with David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (GTD) to help our fellow small business owners get a handle on the constant pressure to be efficient and organized. We continue this series with the review of the classic “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey, which is considered by many to be the bible on life organization and productivity.
Back in the early 90′s I was just beginning my career and learning how to navigate the demands of a full time job. I was also taking classes to complete my bachelor’s degree so I had quite a full plate to manage. While working in the IT department of a national home building company, I worked for someone who would eventually become my first mentor. His name was Carlos Diggs and when he hired me I was pretty inexperienced but quite cocky – which is usually a disastrous combination. The first few months I got to know him I found out that he was a well-organized and thoughtful manager with a smooth approach to everything. He was someone I looked up to and wanted to learn from. I noticed that he always carried around this calendar book and when I asked him what it was, he remarked it is a “Seven Habits Organizer.” Before the days of PDA’s that evolved into the iPhone and Google apps you have in your hand, everyone had these organizers.
So I asked him what is this “Seven Habits”? His response was “a system to organize your time but also to free you up for the things that matter most.” That cryptic description had me intrigued so I asked him “how can I learn this?” and he handed me his copy of “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey. I read the book in my free time and it outlined a system that is still one of the most popular productivity systems in use today.
The Seven Habits Outlined
When Dr. Covey was studying for his doctorate, he reviewed 200 different books on success that had written over the last three centuries. What he found was fascinating. He saw that for prior to World War I, motivational or success literature was based on the principles of integrity, humility, justice and courage. This was called the “Character Ethic” but after World War I he saw that the last 90 years of literature was comprised of books based on tricks and short-term principles. This what is called the personality ethic. Covey’s main point in the book is that we need to stop going for the quick fix in most of the personality ethic books and return to the character ethic in our approach to life. He proposes that you start “inside out” meaning that you have to work on your character ethic first and build up a set of core principles that you live by. From there, those principles ensure that you develop highly effective habits that enable you to achieve your goals and dreams.
Our habits consist of knowledge, skill, and desire and Covey is quoted as saying,“knowledge allows us to know what to do, skill gives us the ability to know how to do it, and desire is the motivation to do it.”
The Seven Habits move us through the following stages:
- Dependence: that which we are born into and rely on others to take care of us
- Independence: where we can make our own decisions and take care of ourselves
- Interdependence: where we must cooperate to achieve something that cannot be achieved independently.
The first three habits focus on self-mastery, that is, achieving the private victories required to move from dependence to independence. The next three habits address interdependence and the seventh habit is one of renewal and continual improvement, that is, of building one’s personal production capability. To be effective, one must find the proper balance between actually producing and improving one’s capability to produce. Let’s look at each habit in a little more depth.
Habit #1 – Be Proactive
Being proactive does not mean you are pushy but are taking the initiative to get something done. It is centered on the ability to control one’s environment, rather than it controlling you, which happens so often. Covey states, “The response you choose is based on your character development. The better your character is developed, the better your response will be.”
Habit 2 – Begin with the End in Mind
Covey calls this the habit of personal leadership – leading oneself towards achieving your goals. By developing the habit of concentrating on relevant activities you will build a platform to avoid distractions and become more productive and successful. In the book Covey uses a visualization exercise – “Picture the end of your life, as this will be the frame of reference by which you will build your character. Ask yourself what principles you would like to be remembered by.” The belief is that by keeping the principles by which you want to be remembered by firmly in your mind, you will start to develop habits that grow and enforce the principles in your daily life and guide all your actions.
Covey also uses a concept called Roles and Goals to help you define what you would like to be remembered as. At any point in life, you could play the following roles:
- Student
- Worker
- Manager
- Son/Daughter
- Father/Mother
- Brother/Sister
By writing down the roles that you perform in your own life and writing down goals for each of these roles based on the ‘end in mind’ you can measure whether you are living by the principles that will achieve the “end in mind.”
Habit #3 – Put First Things First
Covey calls this the habit of personal management. You could also call this the time management habit, but I personally don’t like to use the term “time management” because you can’t really manage or control time, but you can maximize how productive you are with it.
Habit #3 is about organizing and implementing activities in line with the aims established in Habit #2. He quotes Goethe -‘Things which matter most should never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” The two items that determine this are importance and urgency and from this is how his famous “Four Quadrants” model was born.
To practice the Four Quadrants yourself, take a box and draw two lines one vertical and one horizontal splitting the boxes into four smaller boxes essentially creating four quadrants. Across the top write “Critical” in the first column and “Not Critical” in the second column. Across the left side write “Important” in the first row and “Not Important” in the second row. Now combine them into Critical/Important (Quadrant 1), Not Critical/Important (Quadrant 2), Critical/Not Important (Quadrant 3) and Not Critical/Not Important (Quadrant 4). Many people spend time doing wasteful things which reside in Quadrant 4 and let things they should be working on move into Quadrant 1 where they become fire drill-like problems. The whole point of this is to keep things in Quadrant 2 where things that are important are getting taken care of and don’t slip into Quadrant 1. This allows you to stay proactive instead of living life in a reactive mode. By prioritizing around this you are easily able to say no to unimportant things. Utilizing your “Roles and Goals” from Habit #2 is great in helping you determine this.
To be continued….Next Time in Part 2
In the second part of this two-part post on the seven habits we will continue with Habits #4-6 that address interdependence and the seventh habit that is one of renewal and continual improvement, that is, of building one’s personal production capability.