Covey's 7 Habits: "Every Minute of Every Day"

Our lives are divided up into minutes; they are divided up into hours. In the end, a life is nothing but a succession of minutes, or of hours.

Therefore, to ask what our life should be about, is to ask what each of the minutes we experience should be about.

Covey and the 7 Habits try to lay out a groundwork for answering this question.

Of course, naturally, our lives cannot realistically be about only one thing. There are various domains of life that all of us participate in.

For example, we are all inhabitants of a body, and that is structured around principles.

Principles like "Vegetables and fruits, and non-animal proteins are healthy" govern the rules of life for your body; this example is important, because it illustrates that we cannot necessarily always pick our values as if from a smorgasbord of choices as offered in a democracy: certain values have certain consequences -- in the end there are often "right values" and "wrong values."

A way of looking at Covey's approach is to examine his ideas from two frameworks:

- the question of what you will do with the "minutes" you have, or with the "hours" you have, and...

- what are the "right values" ?

Combining these two issues is where success lies:
1) recognize you have choice within each chunk of time, in each day, in each week, and
2) ascertain which values should govern those chunks of time.