The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

[johnw654]

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Powerful Lessons in Personal Change was a groundbreaker when it was first published in 1990, and it continues to be a business bestseller with more than 10 million copies sold. Stephen Covey, an internationally respected leadership authority, realizes that true success encompasses a balance of personal and professional effectiveness, so this book is a manual for performing better in both arenas. His anecdotes are as frequently from family situations as from business challenges.
Before you can adopt the seven habits, you'll need to accomplish what Covey calls a "paradigm shift"--a change in perception and interpretation of how the world works. Covey takes you through this change, which affects how you perceive and act regarding productivity, time management, positive thinking, developing your "proactive muscles" (acting with initiative rather than reacting), and much more.


This isn't a quick-tips-start-tomorrow kind of book. The concepts are sometimes intricate, and you'll want to study this book, not skim it. When you finish, you'll probably have Post-it notes or hand-written annotations in every chapter, and you'll feel like you've taken a powerful seminar by Covey. --Joan Price--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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mahamnoor1973-post

[Busydave]

I found Covey to be the most idealistic, nebulous, and irrelevant time management writer I have ever read. I will admit my copy was, as the review suggests, heavily underlined on many pages. But whenever I revisited it, I found that it added up to just so much hot air, which vanished after I put it down.

Eventually I dropped it in the trash.

Time management should take us to where the rubber meets the road ... not park us somewhere in orbit gazing down on the world. 7 Habits is not so much a book on time management as a collection of sermons. When you read it you end up feeling like some sort of irresponsible sinner, pummelled on the head for hours with righteous pillows.

The daily organizer is less than useless: you carefully work out your number one priority for the day, focus your energy and enthusiasm on it … then at 2 minutes past nine your table of priorities is kicked over by today’s crisis. What hope have you of refocusing your energies to deal with your new duties?

And when the heck is the right time focus on a priority C3 task?

Covey might be good for Sunday service reflection, but it is a waste of time for real world time management. Reading it actually de-motivated me.

Franklin Covey may have had something good to say at the start, but it seems to me that they are now just another stationery and luggage retailer.

Dave

[bassdrone42]

I totally agree. I read 7 Habits at the suggestion of a colleague. Though I'm glad that I read it, the preachy overtones were way too much to handle.

It has now found a happy place on my book shelf, never to be opened again.

JC

[stsanford]

There is a simple way to incorporate Covey's plan: Weekly planning.

I've read the 7th & 8th habits, and while I didn't find him too preachy, I do ffel there's a lot of hot air, or what I lik to call "feel good speak" - I will admit I do use his Indian Talking Stick analogy when having heated discussions with colleagues and my wife from time to time

I feel that it's important to start at the top and work down. I've totally discounted the A1, A2, B3 thing. (I was just at a Covey workshop yesterday and left at lunch. It just isn't that realistic, but isn't DA's approach similar with the levels of importance???

Here's what I do, and I use the FC software to help with this, but just to help...

Sunday afternoon, I look at what I've already got on my schedule for the next week and place "Block Time" around those appointments and commitments to ensure that I'm courteous and run on schedule. I next look at my mission, core values and goals and do my best to schedule at least 2-3 of these. I give them an estimate of the amount of time I think they need to be completed, or if it's a longer project, a suitable amount of time for good progress. I next make notations of where I may be running behind and schedule a Block (for those of you who have used or listened to Anthony Robins' lectures, my blocks are not an exact correlation to an RPM Block) for Catch-up.

The important thing that I just learned yesterday was to not schedule past 65% of my time, this way you have the option of filling in those spaces with the little fires that crop up during a work week...

Hope that helps,

[Cikub]

I found Covey to be the most idealistic, nebulous, and irrelevant time management writer I have ever read.
Dave

Yeah, 7-Habits is a load of crap.

1 - Be Proactive: Why make life difficult by taking control when you can just wake up in the morning and let things and people happen to you all day long?

2 - Begin with the End in Mind: Actually plan for the future? What a waste of time. The future happens by itself--it doesn't need us to help it.

3 - Put First things First: Why on earth would I want to make room in my schedule for things that are important to me? Besides, my parents got Tivo so I can watch my favorite TV shows any time I want.

4 - Think Win Win: Why would I actually care about what's important to the people in my life. Heck, my mom is my mom. She'll love me forever.

5 - Seek First to Understand: Nah. The more I listen, the less I get to talk.

6 - Synergize: I'm all I need--'nuff said.

7 - Sharpen the Saw: Entropy is the natural order of things. Fighting nature can only lead to bad things.

Yeah. It's definitely not worth my valuable to stop and think about such trivial subjects.

C

PS. Time management is only related to 1 of the 7 habits and even that one has nothing to do with ABC prioritization (in fact Covey criticizes it)

[Busydave]

But my point is, aren’t these 7 habits so obvious that it is an insult on Covey’s part to imply that we need to read them? Is he trying to make out that these are great secrets that he (and he only) has discovered through his own experience? And is he now making bazillions of dollars by packaging everyday knowledge in a style of cover normally reserved for college business books?

Reading the obvious can be a rewarding experience first time round. You start with the (dangerous) assumption that if something is in print, it must be authoritative. So you read on and find lots of things that strike a chord with you, and you underline and underline. At the end you have a warm fuzzy feeling – this writer understands you, and further more, he has defused a lot of your day to day tension and mild paranoia by reassuring you that, hey, most other people feel the same way: you’re not falling behind, you’re not out of step.

But it’s the re-read that tells the real story: a book that gives you even five or six nuggets to apply to the way you do things on a daily basis was worth the money. A book that launches you into a whole new way of tracking your life is a real find. But a book that leaves you saying “Yes, very nice, but I knew all that already” is a waste of money.

[CosmoGTD]

I agree that the Covey 7 Habits thing is not that useful, I see it as a type of Preaching, which lots of people like, but I don't.

As far as the FC software!!!! Don't get me started! I used that junk long ago, and there was an online support forum with so many complaints, that FC shut it down, and deleted a massive archive of info.
Then they moved to where they CHARGE people for software support. Very cynical, build junk software literally full of endless bugs, and then charge the poor folks to try and get it working!

I find Covey to be dealing in selling what philosopher Daniel Dennett calls "skyhooks".

Covey is a good Preacher. I won't go off topic here, but if you look back to Covey's book "The Divine Center" he explains how he is going to translate religious concepts into more secular words to reach a broader audience, and this is exactly what he did, and continues to do.
For those of us who are not religious, this is a big turn off.
Even lots of religious folks have problems with Covey's hidden religious theology, which is embedded in his missionary writings, which frankly, are what his books are about.

http://www.hismin.com/habits.htm
http://www.cephasministry.com/mormon_stephen_covey.html
http://www.apologeticsindex.org/c13.html

[mcogilvie]

Yeah, 7-Habits is a load of crap.
....

Yeah. It's definitely not worth my valuable to stop and think about such trivial subjects.

C

PS. Time management is only related to 1 of the 7 habits and even that one has nothing to do with ABC prioritization (in fact Covey criticizes it)

OK, good, you can do sarcasm- always so win-win . I will freely admit that I got a few valuable insights from Covey's 7 Habits and First Things First books. However, there are many books that are just as inspirational.. and a lot shorter, with less "quantum synergy" and similar stuff. Covey never had a decent approach to daily and weekly work that helped me. Franklin had that, but it ultimately relied on a very disciplined approach to time management. Franklin-Covey teachings today are an amalgam of Covey and Hyrum Smith plus reactions to the changing landscape of work. GTD is frankly just a lot easier at the levels of next actions and projects, and at the higher levels you can pick and choose.

[Busydave]

I think the differences between the main writers lies in their view on life. Tony Robbins urges you to really go for it: get everything you can out of life, at hi-octane pace. David Allen is more serene: get the mind clear, release all that creative energy, be a calm centre in the eye of the storm.

Covey seems to want us to be servants first and foremost. He aligns life’s tangles along the lines of “roles”. These are probably not that different from Robbins' areas of life management. But Robbins wants your relationships to be buzzing, juiced, and fulfilling. Covey, on the other hand, sees roles as categories of selfless service.

While I understood, most of Covey’s thinking, the one topic of his that I could never come to terms with was the idea of “Mission”. It seems to me to be a tragically narrow-focussed way to go through life. Also, it seems to be rich in religious overtones, leaving little room for any other interpretation.

Dave

[kewms]

It's been a while since I read Seven Habits, but I seem to remember that the Mission thing grew out of Covey's discovery that people with a strong sense of purpose are both more effective and happier. Which makes sense.

The problem is that development of a personal Mission is, by definition, a deeply introspective exercise. The process is inherently subjective, but Covey needed an objective (i.e. salable to business execs) approach. What he ended up with was (IMO), pretty much guaranteed to be worthless.

Katherine