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.

Covey 7 Habits: Can Covey's 7 Habits be Separated from "Religiosity"

I would like to speculate on whether there is something "religious" about the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

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Covey's 7 Habits are not of course specifically religious. There are references to various religions here and there throughout his books, but there is no sense that this is a missionary project in the sense of trying to convert the reader to belief in God. God, in fact, is almost never mentioned.

Why would this be so, given Covey's obvious connection to the Mormon Church?

Covey, I think, is claiming to have uncovered "patterns for living" that exist, in a sense, regardless of religion. For example, it is simply part of human nature, a rule of human dynamics, that if you truly seek to understand another person's point of view, then they will become more open to your own; in addition, there is also a logical point concealed here: if you want to interact with someone, the more you know about them the more effective your interaction is going to be; it is just "obvious" common sense.

Similarly, focusing on preparation over impulsive action is simply one of those "common sense" facts of life, that people frequently forget.

I feel then that Covey and the 7 Habits, while certainly coming across in tone at times like something resembling a religious text, is largely secular, universally applicable, common sense, but common sense many or most of us tend to ignore, and often do so at our peril.

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