Habit 1: Be Proactive
Change starts from within, and highly effective people make the decision to improve their lives through the things that they can influence rather than by simply reacting to external forces.
Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind
Develop a principle centered personal mission statement. Extend the mission statement into long term goals based on personal principles.
Habit 3: Put First Things First
Spend time doing what fits into your personal mission, observing the proper balance between production and building production capacity. Identify the key roles that you take on in life, and make time for each of them.
Habit 4: Think Win/Win
Seek agreements and relationships that are mutually beneficial. In cases where a "win/win" deal cannot be achieved, accept the fact that agreeing to make "no deal" may be the best alternative. In developing an organizational culture, be sure to reward win/win behavior among employees and avoid inadvertently rewarding win/lose behavior.
Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
First seek to understand the other person, and only then try to be understood. Stephen Covey presents this habit as the most important principle of interpersonal relations. Effective listening is not simply echoing what the other person has said through the lens of one's own experience. Rather, it is putting oneself in the perspective of the other person, listening empathically for both feeling and meaning.
Habit 6: Synergize
Through trustful communication, find ways to leverage individual differences to create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Through mutual trust and understanding, one often can solve conflicts and find a better solution than would have been obtained through either person's own solution.
Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw
Take time out from production to build production capacity through personal renewal of the physical, mental, social/emotional, and spiritual dimensions. Maintain a balance among these dimensions.
If I had to boil all these habits down to two, they’d be:
(1) Do something. Just stop sitting around and take action. Every minute you’re sitting around checking Facebook, you’re not taking action getting you closer to you dreams
and
(2) Plan what you’re taking action about. Don’t just take action willy-nilly. Actually have a plan. Think things through. Do one thing in the right order before you need to do the next thing in order to get where you want to go.
At the start of every week, write a two-by-two matrix on a blank sheet of paper where one side of the matrix says “urgent” and “not urgent” and the other side of the matrix says “important” and “not important.” Then, write all the things you want to do that week.
Quadrant 1: Urgent-Important. These are the most pressing of tasks we’ll likely get to this week. These are the crises that erupt. The most pressing meetings or deadlines fall into this category. When we do fire-fighting, it’s all relating to stuff in this quadrant.
Quadrant 2: Not Urgent – Important. These are the things that matter in the long-term but will yield no tangible benefits this week or even this year. They are things we know we need to get to but probably will push off. It’s having a lunch with an important contact or client. Relationship-building. Some long-term planning. It could be attending a conference to learn about some new area that you’ve heard a little bit about and which sounds promising but might not pan out into anything.
Quadrant 3: Urgent – Not Important. These tasks are the biggest reason we’re not more successful in the long-term. They clog up our time today but, when we look back at these things at the end of the week, we’ll have to admit they were a waste of time. These are interruptions that happen, such as phone calls. These are poorly thought-out meetings that soak up our time, but which we have to attend because we already accepted the invite. These are other activities which we tell ourselves in the moment that we must do but — if we stopped ourselves to really think about — we’d realize they aren’t that important.
Quadrant 4: Not Urgent – Not Important. These things we do because we feel like we’re tired and need a break. It’s watching a mindless TV show at the end of the day. It’s checking and rechecking Facebook and Twitter during the day, because we think we might miss something. It mind be mindlessly eating potato chips, even though we’re not hungry. We prioritize these things in the moment and obviously derive some pleasure from them, but they are really not urgent or important. Yet, we’d be amazed how much time we waste in a given week on these tasks.
Quadrant 2: Not Urgent – Important. These are the things that matter in the long-term but will yield no tangible benefits this week or even this year. They are things we know we need to get to but probably will push off. It’s having a lunch with an important contact or client. Relationship-building. Some long-term planning. It could be attending a conference to learn about some new area that you’ve heard a little bit about and which sounds promising but might not pan out into anything.
Quadrant 3: Urgent – Not Important. These tasks are the biggest reason we’re not more successful in the long-term. They clog up our time today but, when we look back at these things at the end of the week, we’ll have to admit they were a waste of time. These are interruptions that happen, such as phone calls. These are poorly thought-out meetings that soak up our time, but which we have to attend because we already accepted the invite. These are other activities which we tell ourselves in the moment that we must do but — if we stopped ourselves to really think about — we’d realize they aren’t that important.
Quadrant 4: Not Urgent – Not Important. These things we do because we feel like we’re tired and need a break. It’s watching a mindless TV show at the end of the day. It’s checking and rechecking Facebook and Twitter during the day, because we think we might miss something. It mind be mindlessly eating potato chips, even though we’re not hungry. We prioritize these things in the moment and obviously derive some pleasure from them, but they are really not urgent or important. Yet, we’d be amazed how much time we waste in a given week on these tasks.
Recommended Reading
Covey, Stephen R., The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Covey, Stephen R., The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Sources:
http://www.quickmba.com/mgmt/7hab/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/07/24/the-only-thing-you-need-to-remember-about-the-seven-habits-of-highly-effective-people/print/
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