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 -- Is Comfort the Goal

It seems to me that often our society pushes the notion that comfort is the ultimate Good in life. This is a sentiment that many hold, whether they realize it or not, that is pushed by advertising and marketing strategies, but that goes largely unexamined.

Covey suggests however that comfort, or pleasure, or self in general, is not a worthy goal, but that instead that it is principles that should be the focus of our lives.

This is surely not to say that no pleasurable emotions, or feelings of comfort, should be allowed to guide our decisions; on the contrary, it could be argued that, when we arrive at a decision that seems "right", there is often a requirement that we feel "comfortable" or "at peace" with that decision.

The key point, however, is that comfort should not be the GOAL of life; it perhaps should be A goal, but there is so much misery in the world that kind-hearted people with good conscience can do a lot to alleviate, simply making our own personal comfort our objective is unworthy of who we are as human beings.

Stephen Covey and his Seven Habits -- Put First Things First

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Why did I decide to focus on Stephen Covey and his ideas?

Stephen Covey belonged to a group of authors that I used to spend a lot of time focusing on, a group that included Robert Ringer, Susan Jeffers, and other "self-help gurus."

Stephen Covey's work in particular drew me because, ultimately, I am aware that we all live along a time line. In other words, we don't get very long: if you are now forty and you live into your sixties, let us say, you only have 1,000 weeks left! Even if you're twenty and you live to be eighty, that's still only 3,000 weeks...

With this in mind, I wanted a resource that could help me focus on the question: Given I only have, perhaps 2,000 weeks, and maybe less, of my life to live, then how can I best spend my time? I mean, it is hardly an inconsequential question: unless you are a Buddhist or a Hindu, you probably believe this is your only life on earth, the one and only time you've got in this kind of reality, and you may well believe that this is the only form of existence you will have period! So, it matters deeply what you do with your time.

Covey combines "time management" with "seeking out an overall vision." In other words, it is one thing to have an effective time management tool, but this is useless if you do not know what targets you should be aiming at.

Covey's ideas, then, lend themselves to a combining of deep philosophical issues with practical everyday concerns.

Thus, for me, the two overarching habits of the seven habits of Stephen Covey are: Begin with the End in Mind (meaning, find out what it is you should be focusing on), and then to Put First Things First, meaning to stop sacrificing your most important goals to less important tasks...

In the end though, you must Begin with the End in Mind first! In other words, Put first things first, and the "first thing" in this sentence is figuring out what "ends" you should have in mind.

None of the other self-help books I was looking at, including the more academic work of Aaron Beck, for example, emphasized this. In other words, no-one else seemed to pay such rigid respect for the idea that we all live along a time-line, ie., we have to decide what we are doing in the bounds of "the space-time continuum", because there is quite literally no escape from this: for humans, time appears as linear, and this is the foundation for all action, all goal-setting.

Stephen Covey forces you to pay heed to the linear march of time, by asking you to decide what the First Things are that you should be doing.

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.

Stephen Covey Seven Habits: What Motivates Us According to Stephen Covey

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Stephen Covey and his Seven Habits movement, or theory, is worth taking seriously. By this I do not of course mean accepting slavishly: I mean taking a look at what he says, and deciding for yourself whether what you think jibes with the ideas of Covey.

Covey is very interested in what motivates us. Another way of saying this is: What is important to us?

Of course this is a wide question. Clearly we operate in so many domains, we are relatives, lovers, neighbours, workers, members of associations, members of a political society, consumers, and so on. Even if you live in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, I think we can still apply all of these labels to you: Man (and Woman!) has a set of universal experiences.

Covey handles this problem of the complexity of an individual life by suggesting we split the way we see ourselves up into "roles" (much like I have just done in the previous paragraph). ONLY THEN should we turn to focusing on goals.

Covey suggests we write down the roles we see ourselves as possessing. You might be the member of a mosque; you might be the member of the community of Madison, Wisconsin; you might be a father; a son; a neighbour; a steel construction worker, and so on. In short, write down the roles that you see as most important to you, that you fulfil.

Once you have done this, identify some key goals you would like to achieve in each of these areas.

This, then, is the process of clearing up what MOTIVATES US. That is, find out what roles we see as most important for us, then identify some key goals in each of these areas. By the end of the exercise, you should have a much clearer idea of the targets you would like to aim at, in other words, be much more sure of what it is that may be motivating you... This sort of exercise lies at the heart of the work of Stephen Covey.

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