(This is habit 3 in a series on Stephen Covey’s 7 habits. To learn more, please see the initial post)
The third habit involves prioritizing and doing the important things first. For this habit to be successful, it needs the foundation from habit 1 and 2. The outcome of these habits will help you to live a principle-centered life.
This habit is focused on maintaining personal discipline and prioritization to carry out the necessary tasks daily. Your goals around managing time should be on maintaining or enhancing relationships and accomplishing results (based on your end goals and principles).
In doing this process, you need to think about tasks as spanning two axes:
- Urgent / not urgent
- Important / not important
For example, a task may be urgent, but not important, such as some emails or phone calls. Whereas other tasks, such as maintaining your health and relationships may be very important, yet not urgent. The lack of urgency can make it easy to ignore these tasks when things get busy. To ensure we are properly prioritizing our life, we need to be aware of how we spend our time and the urgency and importance of each task or activity we engage in.
One way to reflect on prioritization is to consider the question: what 1 thing you could do regularly that would greatly improve your life?
This is likely something that is important and not urgent. In order to lead a principled life, we need to make time for the important things, even when they are not urgent. To do so, we need to spend less time on things that are not important (even if they are urgent) and also avoid only dealing with the urgent and important tasks.
This process is easier said than done, but you can transition over time as you remove unimportant tasks and setup better systems to treat the urgent items. Often you will find you can prevent things from becoming urgent by taking appropriate preventative action.
One approach to effective time management is to plan out your time on a weekly basis. This lets you think beyond responding to urgent daily needs. A system for doing this involves:
- Identify the different roles in your life (e.g. personal, spouse, parent, profession, or community).
- Select 1-2 important results you want to accomplish in each role in the coming week. These are your goals for the week. Some of these should be tasks that are important but not urgent, ideally relating to your longer-term goals and principles.
- Using the list of goals, schedule out your time for the week.
- Each day, review your schedule and adapt.
This allows you to ensure you are making time for the important things that are not urgent. However, one thing to keep in mind with this approach is that you should try to be efficient with things and effective with people. Trying to be efficient with people, such as scheduling a short time for your children or spouse can sometimes backfire and not get the desired results.
Adopting such a time management system can help you lead a principled life, ensuring your time is spent on the things that matter.