Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey (23 page)

Having identified roles and set goals, you can translate each goal to a specific day of the week, either as a priority item or, even better, as a specific appointment. You can also check your annual or monthly calendar for any appointments you may have previously made and evaluate their importance in the context of your goals, transferring those you decide to keep to your schedule and making plans to
THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE Brought to you by FlyHeart
reschedule or cancel others.

As you study the following weekly worksheet, observe how each of the 19 most important, often Quadrant II, goals has been scheduled or translated into a specific action plan. In addition, notice the box labeled "Sharpen the Saw TM" that provides a place to plan vital renewing Quadrant II activities in each of the four human dimensions that will be explained in Habit 7.

Even with time set aside to accomplish 19 important goals during the week, look at the amount of remaining unscheduled space on the worksheet! As well as empowering you to Put First Things First, Quadrant II weekly organizing gives you the freedom and the flexibility to handle unanticipated events, to shift appointments if you need to, to savor relationships and interactions with others, to deeply enjoy spontaneous experiences, knowing that you have proactively organized your week to accomplish key goals in every area of your life.

Daily Adapting: With Quadrant II weekly organizing, daily planning becomes more a function of daily adapting, or prioritizing activities and responding to unanticipated events, relationships, and experiences in a meaningful way.

Taking a few minutes each morning to review your schedule can put you in touch with the value-based decisions you made as you organized the week as well as unanticipated factors that may have come up. As you overview the day, you can see that your roles and goals provide a natural prioritization that grows out of your innate sense of balance. It is a softer, more right-brain prioritization that ultimately comes out of your sense of personal mission.

You may still find that the third-generation A, B, C or 1, 2, 3 prioritization gives needed order to daily activities. It would be a false dichotomy to say that activities are either important or they aren't.

They are obviously on a continuum, and some important activities are more important than others. In the context of weekly organizing, third-generation prioritization gives order to daily focus.

But trying to prioritize activities before you even know how they relate to your sense of personal mission and how they fit into the balance of your life is not effective. You may be prioritizing and accomplishing things you don't want or need to be doing at all.

Can you begin to see the difference between organizing your week as a principle-centered, Quadrant II manager and planning your days as an individual centered on something else? Can you begin to sense the tremendous difference the Quadrant II focus would make in your current level of effectiveness?

Having experienced the power of principle-centered Quadrant II organizing in my own life and having seen it transform the lives of hundreds of other people, I am persuaded it makes a difference -- a quantum positive difference. And the more completely weekly goals are tied into a wider framework of correct principles and into a personal mission statement, the greater the increase in effectiveness will be.

Returning once more to the computer metaphor, if Habit 1 says "You're the programmer" and Habit 2 says "Write the program," then Habit 3 says "Run the program," "Live the program." And living it is primarily a function of our independent will, our self-discipline, our integrity, and commitment -- not to short-term goals and schedules or to the impulse of the moment, but to the correct principles and our own deepest values, which give meaning and context to our goals, our schedules, and our lives.

As you go through your week, there will undoubtedly be times when your integrity will be placed on the line. The popularity of reacting to the urgent but unimportant priorities of other people in Quadrant III or the pleasure of escaping to Quadrant IV will threaten to overpower the important Quadrant II activities you have planned. Your principle center, your self-awareness, and your conscience can provide a high degree of intrinsic security, guidance, and wisdom to empower you to
THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE Brought to you by FlyHeart
use your independent will and maintain integrity to the truly important.

But because you aren't omniscient, you can't always know in advance what is truly important. As carefully as you organize the week, these will be times when, as a principle-centered person, you will need to subordinate your schedule to a higher value. Because you are principle-centered, you can do that with an inner sense of peace.

At one point, one of my sons was deeply into scheduling and efficiency. One day he had a very tight schedule, which included down-to-the-minute time allocations for every activity, including picking up some books, washing his car, and "dropping" Carol, his girlfriend, among other things.

Everything went according to schedule until it came to Carol. They had been dating for a long period of time, and he had finally come to the conclusion that a continued relationship would not work out. So, congruent with his efficiency mode, he had scheduled a 10- to 15-minute telephone call to tell her.

But the news was very traumatic to her. One-and-a-half hours later, he was still deeply involved in a very intense conversation with her. Even then, the one visit was not enough. The situation was a very frustrating experience for them both.

Again, you simply can't think efficiency with people. You think effectiveness with people and efficiency with things. I've tried to be "efficient" with a disagreeing or disagreeable person and it simply doesn't work. I've tried to give 10 minutes of "quality time" to a child or an employee to solve a problem, only to discover such "efficiency" creates new problems and seldom resolves the deepest concern.

I see many parents, particularly mothers with small children, often frustrated in their desire to accomplish a lot because all they seem to do is meet the needs of little children all day. Remember, frustration is a function of our expectations, and our expectations are often a reflection of the social mirror rather than our own values and priorities.

But if you have Habit 2 deep inside your heart and mind, you have those higher values driving you.

You can subordinate your schedule to those values with integrity. You can adapt; you can be flexible.

You don't feel guilty when you don't meet your schedule or when you have to change it.

One of the reasons why people resist using third-generation time management tools is because they lose spontaneity; they become rigid and inflexible. They subordinate people to schedules because the efficiency paradigm of the third generation of management is out of harmony with the principle that people are more important than things.

The fourth-generation tool recognizes that principle. It also recognizes that the first person you need to consider in terms of effectiveness rather than efficiency is yourself. It encourages you to spend time in Quadrant II, to understand and center your life on principles, to give clear expression to the purposes and values you want to direct your daily decisions. It helps you create balance in your life.

It helps you rise above the limitations of daily planning and organize and schedule in the context of the week. And when a higher value conflicts with what you have planned, it empowers you to use your self-awareness and your conscience to maintain integrity to the principles and purposes you have determined are most important. Instead of using a road map, you're using a compass.

The fourth generation of self-management is more advanced than the third in five important ways.

First, it's principle-centered. More than giving lip service to Quadrant II, it creates the central paradigm that empowers you to see your time in the context of what is really important and effective Second, it's conscience-directed. It gives you the opportunity to organize your life to the best of your ability in harmony with your deepest values. But it also gives you the freedom to peacefully subordinate your schedule to higher values.

THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE Brought to you by FlyHeart
Third, it defines your unique mission, including values and long-term goals. This gives direction and purpose to the way you spend each day.

Fourth, it helps you balance your life by identifying roles, and by setting goals and scheduling activities in each key role every week.

And fifth, it gives greater context through weekly organizing (with daily adaptation as needed), rising above the limiting perspective of a single day and putting you in touch with your deepest values through review of your key roles.

The practical thread running through all five of these advances is a primary focus on relationships and results and a secondary focus on time.

Delegation: Increasing P and PC

We accomplish all that we do through delegation -- either to time or to other people. If we delegate to time, we think efficiency. If we delegate to other people, we think effectiveness.

Many people refuse to delegate to other people because they feel it takes too much time and effort and they could do the job better themselves. But effectively delegating to others is perhaps the single most powerful high-leverage activity there is.

Transferring responsibility to other skilled and trained people enables you to give your energies to other high-leverage activities. Delegation means growth, both for individuals and for organizations.

The late J. C. Penney was quoted as saying that the wisest decision he ever made was to "let go" after realizing that he couldn't do it all by himself any longer. That decision, made long ago, enabled the development and growth of hundreds of stores and thousands of people.

Because delegation involves other people, it is a Public Victory and could well be included in Habit 4. But because we are focusing here on principles of personal management, and the ability to delegate to others is the main difference between the role of manager and independent producer, I am approaching delegation from the standpoint of your personal managerial skills.

A producer does whatever is necessary to accomplish desired results, to get the golden eggs. A parent who washes the dishes, an architect who draws up blueprints, or a secretary who types correspondence is a producer.

But when a person sets up and works with and through people and systems to produce golden eggs, that person becomes a manager in the interdependent sense. A parent who delegates washing the dishes to a child is a manager. An architect who heads a team of other architects is a manager. A secretary who supervises other secretaries and office personnel is an office manager.

A producer can invest one hour of effort and produce one unit of results, assuming no loss of efficiency.

A manager, on the other hand, can invest one hour of effort and produce 10 or 50 or 100 units through effective delegation.

Management is essentially moving the fulcrum over, and the key to effective management is delegation.

There are basically two kinds of delegation: "gofer delegation" and "stewardship delegation." Gofer delegation means "Go for this, go for that, do this, do that, and tell me when it's done." Most people who are producers have a gofer delegation paradigm. Remember the machete wielders in the jungle?

They are the producers. They roll up their sleeves and get the job done. If they are given a position of supervision or management, they still think like producers. They don't know how to set up a full delegation so that another person is committed to achieve results. Because they are focused on
THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE Brought to you by FlyHeart
methods, they become responsible for the results.

I was involved in a gofer delegation once when our family went water skiing. My son, who is an excellent skier, was in the water being pulled and I was driving the boat. I handed the camera to Sandra and asked her to take some pictures.

At first, I told her to be selective in her picture taking because we didn't have much film left. Then I realized she was unfamiliar with the camera, so I became a little more specific. I told her to be sure to wait until the sun was ahead of the boat and until our son was jumping the wake or making a turn and touching his elbow.

But the more I thought about our limited footage and her inexperience with the camera, the more concerned I became. I finally said, "Look, Sandra, just push the button when I tell you. Okay? And I spent the next few minutes yelling, "Take it! -- Take it! -- Don't take it! -- Don't take it!" I was afraid that if I didn't direct her every move every second, it wouldn't be done right.

That was true gofer delegation, one-on-one supervision of methods. Many people consistently delegate that way. But how much does it really accomplish? And how many people is it possible to supervise or manage when you have to be involved in every move they make?

There's a much better way, a more effective way to delegate to other people. And it's based on a paradigm of appreciation of the self-awareness, the imagination, the conscience, and the free will of other people.

Stewardship delegation is focused on results instead of methods. It gives people a choice of method and makes them responsible for results. It takes more time in the beginning, but it's time well invested. You can move the fulcrum over, you can increase your leverage, through stewardship delegation.