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.

Stephen Covey and his Seven Habits -- First Thing in the Morning

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If Stephen Covey's Seven Habits philosophy seems to you to make sense, then the challenge is to live with it for a period of time, to test out its worth. This is the essence of scientific method: follow your hunch that you think something might be worth pursuing by testing it out in the real world. Indeed, much of the "self-help" movement suggests such projects as a "thirty day challenge," even if this is not done so specifically by Covey.

Covey emphasizes planning, but he suggests planning based on the week rather than the day. This is because, for most people reading this, you are already in a society that divides things up into seven day cycles, so it only seems appropriate that a good starting point would be to fit it with what the rest of your community is doing.

Covey, however, does not neglect the obvious issue that life comes to us in "day-tight compartments," that is, like most(?) species, day and night and our bodies are somehow in sync. The key is not to live in "day-tight compartments" that are so tight that they become divorced from the bigger picture.

Covey, again here, turns to the concept of roles, under which can be grouped goals. He suggests therefore, at the beginning of each week, slotting in the goals you have as related to the roles you have determined yourself to have, across the week. Of course, in practice, these are usually going to be "sub-goals" or "mini-goals", but the emphasis, nevertheless, is working on objectives, and not simply on filling up your schedule.

Stephen Covey and his Seven Habits "self-help" -- Musings on Stephen Covey and the Seven Habits

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Stephen Covey would normally be placed by most commentators under the rubric of self-help. When I think of it, however, I think this does an injustice both to the Seven Habits and to Stephen Covey.

Covey actually advocates NOT focusing on the self. In short, the self is not a worthy focus of our own attention, unless it is in the service of something greater than that self.

This flies in the face of much that we find in psychotherapy. There seems to be an assumption in the orientation of many modes of therapy that it is somehow worthwile to focus on the development of self.

My view is that probably you need to attain a certain threshold of self-satisfaction, ie., of contentment. BUT THIS IS NOT THE ULTIMATE GOAL OF LIFE.

Covey emphasizes this point very well: for Covey, the goal of living is not independence (although the first three habits of the seven habits focuses on this), but effective INTERDEPENDENCE (dealt with in the second three habits of the seven habits).

In other words: YOU are not the goal of life; the goal of life is to SERVE SOMETHING GREATER THAN YOURSELF.

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