The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

In this chapter, Covey encapsulates the first habit as defining yourself as the creator of your life experience. The second habit is defined as using the imagination to visualize your creation. The third habit involves manifesting your creation in the material world. You do this through proper management of yourself and your resources by putting first things first.

In contrast to the right brain activity of conceptualizing a goal, management requires the left-brain activity of organizing and planning the steps to arrive at that goal. Covey recommends the exercise of a person’s independent will to “organize and execute around priorities” (171). If we don’t identify these priorities, we can fall into a reactive state of mind by only dealing with the crisis at hand instead of planning for a meaningful future.

This chapter delves into the process of time management, and Covey recommends using a quadrant approach to distinguish what is urgent from what is truly important. He divides a day’s activities into the following four quadrants:

I) Important and urgent

II) Important but not urgent

III) Not important but urgent

IV) Not important and not urgent

Covey believes that if one is truly attempting to ingrain the third habit of putting first things first, then a person should strive to spend most of their time on activities that fall into Quadrant II. He advises that whenever possible, one should say no to activities that fall into Quadrants III and IV.

Readers who want to master this ability are told to use a fourth-generation time management tool: “The fourth-generation tool recognizes that principle. It also recognizes that the first person you need to consider in terms of effectiveness rather than efficiency is yourself (192).

The book provides a sample worksheet for how to structure one’s time in the most effective way. It is initially necessary to identify roles and select goals. Roles can be defined as individual, spouse, business, etc. Then, these roles are matched with specific goals to be accomplished. The reader should strive to pursue more Quadrant II goals in each of these roles.

Delegation is also suggested as a way to offload goals that are less important. Covey makes a distinction between gofer delegation and steward delegation. He says, “I am convinced that if stewardship delegation is done correctly, both parties will benefit and ultimately much more work will get done in much less time” (200).

The chapter concludes with an exercise that coaches the reader to identify Quadrant II activity, draw a time management matrix, and estimate the percent of time spent in each quadrant. After being reminded to delegate whenever possible, the reader is asked to use this system to manage time for a week. Repetition of the process is meant to ingrain the paradigm shift of automatically prioritizing Quadrant II activities.