7 Habits of Highly Effective People (summary)

For those of you not familiar, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” is a bestselling (15 million+ copies worldwide) book on personal development, written by Stephen R. Covey in 1989.

In this book Covey describes seven habits of successful people. Habits are the activities that we repeatedly do in the same manner, day after day. Our character is a composite of our habits. If you want to become successful, you need to adopt these seven habits (or so the story goes!).

The author says that what ever your present situation is, you are not your habits. You can replace old destructive habits with new habits of effectiveness, happiness and trust-based relationships. The seven habits described in this book are based on natural laws and if you adopt them, they will surely bring maximum long-term beneficial results to you.

People perceive the world differently. We all have our own paradigm and we see things according to them. If you want to change your life, you must first change the way you look at the things, you should focus on improving your personal attitude and behaviour. How to do that, read on the discover the key messages of the book:

Being truly effective means being clear and what it is you want to achieve, and being proactive in putting your goals into action. This is best achieved by striving to synergise with others, to invest in lasting relationships and to maintain a balanced lifestyle.

In a nutshell, it provides the answers to the following questions:

How can you make lasting change to yourself and stay productive on a long-term basis?

• In order to change, you have to address your character and not your behaviour.
• Working on character involves aligning personal paradigms with universal principles.
• Sharper the saw” if you want to keep sawing.

How can you achieve great things and shape the world around you effectively?

• “Be proactive” and take control of your own fate.
• “Being with the end in mind” — if you want to achieve something, you need long-term goals and a mission statement.
• In order to attain your goals, you need to visualise the outcome of every action as clearly as possible before doing it.
• If you want to be truly effective, always “put first things first”.

How can you integrate and synergise successfully with others?

• “Think win-win” to get your share of the cake and build lasting relationships at the same time.
• Forming stable relationships with others means investing in emotional bank accounts.
• If you want to be able to influence others, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
• “Synergise” by treating others with openness and respect.

If you remember one thing, and one thing only, about this book, here it is:

At the start of every week, write a two-by-two matrix on a blank sheet of paper where one side of the matrix says “urgent” and “not urgent” and the other side of the matrix says “important” and “not important.” Then, write all the things you want to do that week.

Quadrant 1: Urgent-Important. These are the most pressing of tasks we’ll likely get to this week. These are the crises that erupt. The most pressing meetings or deadlines fall into this category. When we do fire-fighting, it’s all relating to stuff in this quadrant.

Quadrant 2: Not Urgent — Important. These are the things that matter in the long-term but will yield no tangible benefits this week or even this year. They are things we know we need to get to but probably will push off. It’s having a lunch with an important contact or client. Relationship-building. Some long-term planning. It could be attending a conference to learn about some new area that you’ve heard a little bit about and which sounds promising but might not pan out into anything.

Quadrant 3: Urgent — Not Important. These tasks are the biggest reason we’re not more successful in the long-term. They clog up our time today but, when we look back at these things at the end of the week, we’ll have to admit they were a waste of time. These are interruptions that happen, such as phone calls. These are poorly thought-out meetings that soak up our time, but which we have to attend because we already accepted the invite. These are other activities which we tell ourselves in the moment that we must do but — if we stopped ourselves to really think about — we’d realise they aren’t that important.

Quadrant 4: Not Urgent — Not Important. These things we do because we feel like we’re tired and need a break. It’s watching a mindless TV show at the end of the day. It’s checking and rechecking Facebook and Twitter during the day, because we think we might miss something. It mind be mindlessly eating potato chips, even though we’re not hungry. We prioritise these things in the moment and obviously derive some pleasure from them, but they are really not urgent or important. Yet, we’d be amazed how much time we waste in a given week on these tasks.

If you simply spend 30 minutes at the beginning of each week thinking about these 4 quadrants and what you want to spend your time on in the coming week, you will be 10 times more productive than you usually are.

So there you go, easy, right? If you have experience using the habits in your life, please let me know how they do, and perhaps do not, work for you.