First Things First: The Snapshots Edition

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First Things First - by Stephen R. Covey (Author) , A. Roger Merill, Rebecca R. Merlll

ISBN: 978-1-63353-222-9

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 generations 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.