First Things First
By Stephen R. Covey and A. Roger Merrill
4/5
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About this ebook
Editor's Note
Important & urgent…
This isn’t about saving time — it’s about spending quality time with who (or what) is important for your happiness. Covey breaks down important and urgent tasks into quadrants to illustrate where you should reallocate your time.
Stephen R. Covey
Stephen R. Covey (1932 – 2012) fue profesor, consultor de organizaciones, escritor, un experto en familia y una autoridad internacionalmente respetada en materia de liderazgo. El Dr. Covey dedicó su vida a enseñar una forma de vida y de liderazgo basada en principios para construir tanto familias como organizaciones. Obtuvo un máster en Dirección de Empresas de la Universidad de Harvard y un doctorado por la Brigham Young University, donde fue profesor de conducta organizacional y dirección de empresas. También ejerció las funciones de director de relaciones universitarias y asistente del presidente. El Dr. Covey escribió varios libros de éxito, entre ellos el bestseller internacional Los 7 hábitos para la gente altamente efectiva, considerado « el libro de negocios más influyente del siglo XX» y uno de los diez libros de gestión empresarial más relevantes de todos los tiempos; una obra de la que se han vendido más de 15 millones de ejemplares en treinta y ocho idiomas en todo el mundo. Entre otros bestsellers del profesor Covey se encuentran Primero lo primero, El liderazgo centrado en principios y Los 7 hábitos de las familias altamente efectivas, que elevan el número de libros vendidos a más de 20 millones. Como padre de nueve hijos y abuelo de cuarenta y tres nietos, recibió el galardón a la Paternidad de la National Fatherhood Initiative, el premio que más valoraba de cuantos le fueron otorgados. Entre las muchas distinciones de las que fue objeto, cabe destacar el Thomas More College Medallion por sus servicios constantes a la Humanidad; el de Conferenciante del año en 1999; el Premio Sikh al hombre internacional del año 1994 y el Premio de grandeza al empresario nacional del año por su liderazgo empresarial. El Time lo incluyó en su lista de los veinticinco norteamericanos más influyentes y recibió la condecoración de siete doctorados honoris causa. El doctor Covey fue cofundador y vicepresidente de la FranklinCovey Company, empresa líder a escala global en servicios profesionales, con oficinas en más de 150 países. Todas estas organizaciones comparten su visión, su disciplina y su pasión por motivar, mejorar y proveer herramientas destinadas al cambio y al crecimiento de individuos y organizaciones de todo el mundo.
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Reviews for First Things First
15 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I still don't like living by a system, but this one makes sense.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5One of the best books written on how to manage your time and your life.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A tie-in with the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People on how to manage time. Puts forth ideas and methods for ensuring that the important things in life get taken care of. Great book for examining your life and where you should be taking it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A deeper reflection on one of the 7 Habits, this book develops the "4th generation" of time management. Such skill involves knowing inherently one's value and then creating quadrant II space to achieve what is most important. The Laws of Life, such as the principle of the Farm and emotional bank accounts must be considered. The book frequently challenges the paradigm that busy = success and instead replaces it with the value of the compass over the clock, i.e. why scramble in the wrong direction. A key element of 4th generation planning involves starting with roles, listing important objectives, and then scheduling the week around them. The analogy is drawn of putting rocks (important things), gravel, sand, and water (urgent details) into a glass jar. The principle of interdependence is also emphasized.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Excellent discussion of a terrifically useful concept. Finding a way to move from what's urgent to what's important. Like all such books, it goes on too much, but get the key idea and it's (barely) worth slogging through the inevitable self-congratulatory/evangelical dross.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A book well worth reading, and probably more than once. It is long for the simple message but it needs that for your brain to have the time to really absorb the message.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Great read, with practical tips on how to gain a life in line with your personal mission statement.
Book preview
First Things First - Stephen R. Covey
Copyright © 2015 by FranklinCovey Co.
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First Things First - by Stephen R. Covey (Author) , A. Roger Merill, Rebecca R. Merlll
ISBN: 978-1-63353-306-6
Table of Contents
Introduction
THE CLOCK AND THE COMPASS
THE MAIN THING IS TO KEEP THE MAIN THING THE MAIN THING
THE SYNERGY OF INTERDEPENDENCE
THE POWER AND PEACE OF PRINCIPLE CENTERED LIVING
Introduction
If working harder, smarter, and faster won’t solve it, what will?
IF you were to pause and think seriously about the first things
in your life—the three or four things that matter most—what would they be?
Are these things receiving the care, emphasis, and time you really want to give them?
Through our work at the Covey Leadership Center, we’ve come in contact with many people from around the world, and we’re constantly impressed with what they represent. They’re active, hardworking, competent, caring people dedicated to making a difference. Yet, these people consistently tell us of the tremendous struggles they face daily while trying to put first things first in their lives. The fact that you picked up this book indicates that you can probably identify with what they’re feeling.
Basing our happiness on our ability to control everything is futile. While we do control our choice of action, we cannot control the consequences of our choices. Universal laws or principles do. Thus, we are not in control of our lives; principles are. We suggest that this idea provides key insight into the frustration people have had with the traditional time management
approach to life.
In this book, we present a dramatically different approach to time management. This is a principle centered approach. It transcends the traditional prescriptions of faster, harder, smarter, and more. Rather than offering you another clock, this approach provides you with a compass—because more important than how fast you’re going, is where you’re headed.
In one sense, this approach is new; in another, it’s very old. It’s deeply rooted in classic, timeless principles that represent a distinct contrast to the quick-fix, wealth without work approach to life promoted by so much of the current time management and success
literature. We live in a modern society that loves shortcut techniques. Yet quality of life cannot be achieved by taking the right shortcut.
There is no shortcut. But there is a path. The path is based on principles revered throughout history. If there is one message to glean from this wisdom, it is that a meaningful life is not a matter of speed or efficiency. It’s much more a matter of what you do and why you do it, than how fast you get it done.
We’d like to let you know what you can expect from First Things First:
In Section One, The Clock and the Compass,
we’ll look at the gap many of us feel between the way we spend our time and what’s deeply important to us. We’ll describe the three genera tions
of traditional time management that comprise the current paradigm of efficiency and control, and discuss why this traditional clock only
approach essentially increases the gap instead of closing it. We’ll look at the need for a new level of thinking—for a fourth generation that’s different in kind. We’ll encourage you to examine the way you spend your time now to determine if you’re doing what’s merely urgent
or what’s really important
in your life, and we’ll look at the consequences of urgency addiction.
Finally, we’ll take a look at first things
—our basic human needs and capacities to live, to love, to learn, and to leave a legacy—and how to put them first by using our inner compass to align our lives with the true north
realities that govern quality of life.
In Section Two, The Main Thing Is to Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing,
we’ll introduce the Quadrant II organizing process—a thirty-minute weekly process that subordinates the clock to the compass and empowers you to shift the focus from urgency
to importance.
We’ll go through the process once to give you a sense of the immediate benefits; then we’ll go through each part of the process in depth to show you the richness of what it can do in your life over time. We’ll look at:
• how to detect your mission and create an empowering future vision that gives meaning and purpose and, in effect, becomes the DNA of your life.
• how to create balance and synergy among the various roles in your life.
• how to set and achieve principle-based goals that create quality of life results.
• how to maintain a perspective that empowers you to keep first things first.
• how to act with integrity in the moment of choice—to have the wisdom and judgment to know whether putting first things first
means sticking to your plan or changing . . . and to be able to do whichever you decide with confidence and peace.
• how to turn your weeks into an upward spiral of learning and living.
In Section Three, The Synergy of Interdependence,
we’ll address the problems and the potential of the interdependent reality in which we spend 80 percent of our time—an area essentially ignored or inadequately dealt with by traditional time management. We’ll look at the difference between transactional and transformational interactions with others. Instead of seeing other people merely as resources through which we can get more done through delegation, we’ll see how to create powerful synergy through shared vision and synergistic agreements. We’ll look at empowerment—the ultimate moving the fulcrum over
—and offer insight into things you can do to nurture personal and organizational empowerment and become a change catalyst for your family, work group, or other organization.
In Section Four, The Power and Peace of Principle Centered Living,
we’ll look at some real life examples, and show how the fourth-generation approach will literally transform the quality of your day and the nature of what you do. We’ll conclude the book by focusing on the principles of peace and how to avoid the main obstacles to a life of fulfillment, meaning, and joy.
To get the most out of this material requires that you become involved with it in a deep way—to be willing to examine your life, your scripts, your motives, your first things,
and what you represent. This is a highly introspective process. As you work with the material, we encourage you to pause frequently and listen to your own mind and heart. It’s impossible to get deeply absorbed in this kind of profound self-knowledge and not emerge unchanged. You’ll see the world differently. You’ll see relationships differently. You’ll see time differently. You’ll see yourself differently. We are convinced that this material can empower you to close the gap between what’s deeply important to you and the way you spend your time.
We thank you for being willing to consider what we believe to be a better way. We’re convinced from our own experience that principles produce both personal peace and dramatic results.
The power is in the principles.
It’s our belief that the material in this book can help you escape the tyranny of the clock and rediscover your compass. This compass will empower you to live, love, learn, and leave a great and enduring legacy . . . with joy.
THE CLOCK AND THE COMPASS
Stephen: My daughter Maria, who recently had her third child, was talking with me one evening. She said, I’m so frustrated, Dad! You know how much I love this baby, but she is literally taking all my time. I’m just not getting anything else done, including many things that only I can do.
I could understand how this was frustrating to her. Maria is bright and capable, and she’s always been involved in many good things. She was feeling pulled by good things—projects she wanted to accomplish, contributions she wanted to make, things around the house that weren’t getting done.
As we talked, we came to the realization that her frustration was essentially a result of her expectations. And for now, only one thing was needful—enjoying that baby.
Just relax,
I said. Relax and enjoy the nature of this new experience. Let this infant feel your joy in the role of mother. No one else can love and nurture that child the way you can. All other interests pale in comparison for now.
Maria realized that, in the short run, her life was going to be imbalanced... and that it should be. "There is a time and a season for everything under the sun. ’ She also realized that as the baby grew and entered a different phase in life, she would be able to reach her goals and contribute in other powerful ways.
Finally, I said, Don’t even keep a schedule. Forget your calendar. Stop using your planning tools if they only induce guilt. This baby is the first thing in your life right now. Just enjoy the baby and don’t worry. Be governed by your internal compass, not by some clock on the wall.
For many of us, there’s a gap between the compass and the clock— between what’s deeply important to us and the way we spend our time. And this gap is not closed by the traditional time management
approach of doing more things faster. In fact, many of us find that increasing our speed only makes things worse.
Consider this question: If someone were to wave a magic wand and suddenly grant you the 15 or 20 percent increase in efficiency promised by traditional time management, would it solve your time management concerns? While you may feel initially excited about the prospect of increasing your efficiency, if you’re like most of the people we work with, you’ll probably conclude that the challenges you face cannot be solved simply by increasing your ability to get more things done in less time.
In this section, we’ll take an in-depth look at the three generations of traditional time management and explore the reasons why they fail to close that gap. We’ll ask you to consider whether you look at life through a basic paradigm of urgency
or importance,
and we’ll discuss the effects of urgency addiction. We’ll look at the need for a fourth generation that’s different in kind. More than time management,
it’s a generation of personal leadership. More than doing things right, it’s focused on doing the right things.
In Chapter 3, we’ll address the hard questions about what first things
are in our lives and our capacity to put them first. This chapter deals with the three core ideas at the very heart of the fourth generation. It will probably challenge the way you think about time and life. This chapter requires an emotional willingness to do some deep interior work. We suggest you go through it in sequence, but if you feel it would be more useful for you, go on to Section Two, get into the Quadrant II organizing process, see the benefits of what we’re talking about, and then come back to Chapter 3. We guarantee that understanding and applying the three fundamental ideas in this chapter will have a dramatic impact on your time and the quality of your life.
How Many People on Their Deathbed Wish They’d Spent More Time at the Office?
WE’RE constantly making choices about the way we spend our time, from the major seasons to the individual moments in our lives. We’re also living with the consequences of those choices. And many of us don’t like those consequences—especially when we feel there’s a gap between how we’re spending our time and what we feel is deeply important in our lives.
My life is hectic! I’m running all day—meetings, phone calls, paper-work, appointments. I push myself to the limit, fall into bed exhausted, and get up early the next morning to do it all again. My output is tremendous; I’m getting a lot done. But I get this feeling inside sometimes, So what? What are you doing that really counts?
I have to admit, I don’t know.
I feel like I’m being torn apart. My family is important to me; so is my work. I live with constant conflict, trying to juggle the demands of both. Is it possible to be really successful—and happy—at the office and at home?
There is simply too little of me to go around. The board and share-holders are on me like a swarm of bees for our declining share prices. I’m constantly playing referee in turf wars between members of my executive team. I feel tremendous pressure to be leading our organization’s quality improvement initiative. The morale among our employees is low and I feel guilty for not getting out with them and listening more. On top of all this, despite our family vacations, my family has all but written me off because they never see me.
I don’t feel in control of my life. I try to figure out what’s important and set goals to do it, but other people—my boss, my work associates, my spouse—continually throw wrenches into the works. What I set out to do is blocked by what other people want me to do for them. What’s important to me is getting swept away in the current of what’s important to everybody else.
Everyone tells me I’m highly successful. I’ve worked and scraped and sacrificed, and I’ve made it to the top. But I’m not happy. Way down inside I have this empty feeling. It’s like the song says, Is that all there is?
Most of the time, I just don’t enjoy life. For every one thing I do, I can think of ten things I don’t do, and it makes me feel guilty. The constant stress of trying to decide what I should do in the middle of all I could do creates a constant tension. How can I know what’s most important? How can I do it? How can I enjoy it?
I feel like I have some sense of what I should do with my life. I’ve written down what I feel is really important and I set goals to make it happen. But somewhere between my vision and my daily action, I lose it. How can I translate what really counts into my daily life?
Putting first things first is an issue at the very heart of life. Almost all of us feel torn by the things we want to do, by the demands placed on us, by the many responsibilities we have. We all feel challenged by the day-to-day and moment-by-moment decisions we must make regarding the best use of our time.
Decisions are easier when it’s a question of good
or bad.
We can easily see how some ways we could spend our time are wasteful, mind-numbing, even destructive. But for most of us, the issue is not between the good
and the bad,
but between the good
and the best.
So often, the enemy of the best is the good.
Stephen: I knew a man who was asked to be the new dean of the College of Business of a large university. When he first arrived, he studied the situation the college faced and felt that what it needed most was money. He recognized that he had a unique capacity to raise money, and he developed a real sense of vision about fund-raising as his primary function.
This created a problem in the college because past deans had focused mainly on meeting day-to-day faculty needs. This new dean was never there. He was running around the country trying to raise money for research, scholarships, and other endowments. But he was not attending to the day-to-day things as the previous dean had. The faculty had to work through his administrative assistant, which was demeaning to many of them who were used to working with the person at the top.
The faculty became so upset with his absence that they sent a delegation to the president of the university to demand a new dean or a fundamental change in his leadership style. The president, who knew what the dean was doing, said, Relax. He has a good administrative assistant. Give him some more time.
Within a short time, the money started pouring in and the faculty began to recognize the vision. It wasn’t long until every time they saw the dean, they would say, Get out of here! We don’t want to see you. Go out and bring in more funds. Your administrative assistant runs this office better than anyone else.
This man admitted to me later that the mistake he made was in not doing enough team building, enough explaining, enough educating about what he was trying to accomplish. I’m sure he could have done better, but I learned a powerful lesson from him. We need to constantly be asking ourselves, What is needed out there, and what is my unique strength, my gift?
It would have been easy for this man to meet the urgent expectations of others. He could have had a career at the university filled with many good things. But had he not discerned both the real needs and his own unique capacities, and carried out the vision he developed, he would never have achieved the best for him, the faculty, or the college.
What is best
for you? What keeps you from giving those best
things the time and energy you want to give them? Are too many good
things getting in the way? For many people, they are. And the result is the unsettling feeling that they’re not putting first things first in their lives.
THE CLOCK AND THE COMPASS
Our struggle to put first things first can be characterized by the contrast between two powerful tools that direct us: the clock and the compass. The clock represents our commitments, appointments, schedules, goals, activities—what we do with, and how we manage our time. The compass represents our vision, values, principles, mission, conscience, direction—what we feel is important and how we lead our lives.
The struggle comes when we sense a gap between the clock and the compass—when what we do doesn’t contribute to what is most important in our lives.
For some of us, the pain of the gap is intense. We can’t seem to walk our talk. We feel trapped, controlled by other people or situations. We’re always responding to crises. We’re constantly caught up in the thick of thin things
—putting out fires and never making time to do what we know would make a difference. We feel as though our lives are being lived for us.
For others of us, the pain is a vague discomfort. We just can’t get what we feel we should do, what we want to do, and what we actually do all together. We’re caught in dilemmas. We feel so guilty over what we’re not doing, we can’t enjoy what we do.
Some of us feel empty. We’ve defined happiness solely in terms of professional or financial achievement, and we find that our success
did not bring us the satisfaction we thought it would. We’ve painstakingly climbed the ladder of success
rung by rung—the diploma, the late nights, the promotions—only to discover as we reached the top rung that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. Absorbed in the ascent, we’ve left a trail of shattered relationships or missed moments of deep, rich living in the wake of the intense, overfocused effort. In our race up the rungs, we simply did not take the time to do what really mattered most.
Others of us feel disoriented or confused. We have no real sense of what first things
are. We move from one activity to another on automatic. Life is mechanical. Once in a while, we wonder if there’s any meaning in our doing.
Some of us know we’re out of balance, but we don’t have confidence in other alternatives. Or we feel the cost of change is too high. Or we’re afraid to try. It’s easier to just live with the imbalance.
WAKE UP CALLS
We may be brought to an awareness of this gap in a dramatic way. A loved one dies. Suddenly she’s gone and we see the stark reality of what could have been, but wasn’t, because we were too busy climbing the ladder of success
to cherish and nurture a deeply satisfying relationship.
We may find out our teenage son is on drugs. Pictures flood our minds—times we could have spent through the years doing things together, sharing, building the relationship . . . but didn’t because we were too busy earning a living, making the right connections, or simply reading the newspaper.
The company’s downsizing and our job’s on the line. Or our doctor tells us we have just a few months to live. Or our marriage is threatened by divorce. Some crisis brings us to an awareness that what we’re doing with our time and what we feel is deeply important don’t match.
Rebecca: Years ago, I was visiting with a young woman in the hospital who was only twenty-three years old and had two small children at home. She had just been told she had incurable cancer. As I held her hand and tried to think of something to say that might comfort her, she cried, I would give anything just to go home and change a messy diaper!
As I thought about her words and my experience with my own small children, I wondered how many times both of us had changed diapers out of a sense of duty, hurriedly, even frustrated by the seeming inconvenience in our busy lives, rather than cherishing precious moments of life and love we had no way of knowing would ever come again.
In the absence of such wake-up calls,
many of us never really confront the critical issues of life. Instead of looking for deep chronic causes, we look for quick-fix Band-Aids and aspirin to treat the acute pain. Fortified by temporary relief, we get busier and busier doing good
things and never even stop to ask ourselves if what we’re doing really matters most.
THE THREE GENERATIONS OF TIME MANAGEMENT
In our effort to close the gap between the clock and the compass in our lives, many of us turn to the field of time management.
While just three decades ago there were fewer than a dozen significant books on the subject, our most recent survey led us through well over a hundred books, hundreds of articles, and a wide variety of calendars, planners, software, and other time management tools. It reflects something of a popcorn phenomenon,
with the increasing heat and pressure of the culture creating a rapidly exploding body of literature and tools.
In making this survey, we read, digested, and boiled down the information to eight basic approaches to time management. These range from the more traditional efficiency
oriented approaches such as the Get Organized
Approach, the Warrior Approach, and the ABC or Prioritization Approach, to some of the newer approaches that are pushing traditional paradigms. These include the more Far Eastern Go with the Flow
Approach, which encourages us to get in touch with the natural rhythms of life—to connect with those timeless
moments in time when the tick of the clock simply fades away in the joy of the moment. They also include the Recovery Approach, which shows how such time wasters as procrastination and ineffective delegation are often the result of deep psychological scripting, and how environmentally scripted people pleasers
often overcommit and overwork out of fear of rejection and shame.
We’ve provided both a brief explanation of each of these approaches and a bibliography in Appendix B for those who are interested. But we generally find that most people relate more to what could be called the three generations
of time management. Each generation builds on the one before it and moves toward greater efficiency and control.
First Generation. The first generation is based on reminders.
It’s go with the flow,
but try to keep track of things you want to do with your time—write the report, attend the meeting, fix the car, clean out the garage. This generation is characterized by simple notes and checklists. If you’re in this generation, you carry these lists with you and refer to them so you don’t forget to do things. Hopefully, at the end of the day, you’ve accomplished many of the things that you set out to do and you can check them off your list. If those tasks are not accomplished, you put them on your list for tomorrow.
Second Generation. The second generation is one of planning and preparation.
It’s characterized by calendars and appointment books. It’s efficiency, personal responsibility, and achievement in goal setting, planning ahead, and scheduling future activities and events. If you’re in this generation, you make appointments, write down commitments, identify deadlines, note where meetings will be held. You may even keep this in some kind of computer or network.
Third Generation. The third generation approach is planning, prioritizing, and controlling.
If you’re in this generation, you’ve probably spent some time clarifying your values and priorities. You’ve asked yourself, What do I want?
You’ve set long, medium , and short-range goals to obtain these values. You prioritize your activities on a daily basis. This generation is characterized by a wide variety of planners and organizers—electronic as well as paper-based—with detailed forms for daily planning.
In some ways, these three generations of time management have brought us a long way toward increased effectiveness in our lives. Such things as efficiency, planning, prioritization, values clarification, and goal setting have made a significant positive difference.
But, bottom-line, for most people—even with the tremendous increase in interest and material—the gap remains between what’s deeply important to them and the way they spend their time. In many cases, it’s exacerbated. We’re getting more done in less time,
people are saying, but where are the rich relationships, the inner peace, the balance, the confidence that we’re doing what matters most and doing it well?
Roger: These three generations describe a chronicle of my history in time management. I was raised in the Carmel, Pebble Beach area in California. The artistic, free-thinking, philosophical environment was certainly in generation one. I would jot down, from time to time, things I didn’t want to forget—particularly golf tournaments, which were a big part of my life. Because I was also involved in ranches and quarter horses, there were certain seasons and other important things not to forget.
As I moved on, the need to get more done in less time, the demands of the many things I wanted to do, and the rich opportunities that were around drove me deeply into the second generation. I read everything I could get my hands on in the area of time management. In fact, my business, for a period of time, was as a time management consultant. I would work with individuals to help them become more efficient, organize things better, learn how to handle the telephone and so forth. Typically, after observing and analyzing their activities for a day, I would make specific suggestions on things they could do to get more done in less time.
As time went on, I found to my dismay that I wasn’t really sure that I was helping. In fact, I began to wonder if I was just helping people fail faster. The problem wasn’t how much they were getting done. It was where they were trying to go, and what they were trying to accomplish. People wanted to know how they were doing, but I realized I couldn’t tell them unless I knew what it was they were trying to do. This drove me into generation three. In fact, both Stephen and I were quite involved in some of the work that began this third