1. Describe the desired results patiently and clearly, so that everyone is clear on the expected outcome.
2. Giving (minimal) guidelines for any key methods to use. You can also provide some advice on common issues, to prevent them from having to learn from scratch.
3. Identify any resources that are available for them to use.
4. Specify the standards or expectations for performance and when they will be evaluated.
5. State the consequences that will happen depending on the evaluation (both good and bad).

This method can be used in any context, though the specifics will need to change based on the maturity level of those involved. For a less mature audience, you would want to give fewer tasks to complete, with more guidelines and resources. You will also want more frequent check-ins with more immediate consequences. 

(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:

1. Urgent / not urgent
2. 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:

1. Identify the different roles in your life (e.g. personal, spouse, parent, profession, or community).
2. 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.
3. Using the list of goals, schedule out your time for the week.
4. 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.

(This is habit 2 in a series on Stephen Covey’s 7 habits. To learn more, please see the initial post)

The second habit is about focusing on the ends you want to achieve. By knowing where you are heading and your values, you can use this vision and direction to drive all of your actions. This is critical as without an established direction, you may end up putting a lot of energy in the wrong path and then work against what matters the most to you.

This general direction is far more important than figuring out all the specifics, which you can determine along the way. One approach to codify your direction is to write a personal mission statement.

A personal mission statement focuses on:
1) What you want to be.
2) What you want to do.
3) The values and principles which the above is based on.

This statement is not easy to write as it requires a lot of reflection to determine what really matters and how these are prioritized. In order to do so, you need to think about your core values and paradigms through which you interpret the world. One approach is to focus on different roles in your life, such as as a spouse, parent, or in your profession, and define your values and goals in each area.

Our core values involve our sense of identity and self-esteem, our source of direction and perspectives in life, and our ability to do things and make change. These aspects are interdependent and impact all parts of our life. Part of this process is realizing where you are currently centered and try to adjust and center yourself towards the life you want to lead.

Many of us are not in an ideal position. Often we get overly focused on certain aspects of life, such as our spouse, family, money, work, possessions (whether physical or status), pleasure, friends or enemies, church, or ourselves. While this can be quite positive in some aspects, it can make us fragile to setbacks in that area. You likely can identify people you know with these different core focuses. It’s often easier to identify how someone else is centered than how we are, yet we must look inward in order to make progress on our own improvement.

We are a complex mix of values and goals, often overly focused on a few aspects in our lives and potentially varying our focus depending on our life context. Without having a strong core direction and set of values, we fluctuate regularly through our lives and lack a firm foundation to work from. Thus, we need to identify where we are currently centered, as well as the direction we want to go.

After going through this identification process and creating a mission statement, you will want to take corrective action to ensure you live by your mission. One way to correct your behaviors is with affirmations. Affirmations are statements of what you want to do or become, such as “It’s deeply satisfying when I respond with love, firmness, and self-control when my children misbehave”.

To make affirmations more actionable and effective, they should be personal, positive, visual and emotional statements written in the present tense. After creating then, you can then visualize the situation in detail and your desired response. By doing this, it allows us to make our desired response practiced and more likely to occur, instead of giving in to an impulse in the moment.

Through this practice, we can set a positive direction for ourselves and work to improve it. We can even apply these same techniques to analyze and create a mission statement for your family or any organization, though it is critical that all members be involved in the creation process.

(This is habit 1 in a series on Stephen Covey’s 7 habits. To learn more, please see the initial post)

We are all affected by different events, which we then respond to. These responses are influenced by a combination of our genes, the upbringing and culture we were raised with, and our environment. However, our responses are not predetermined. We can instead be proactive and work to decide how these events will effect us.

The goal is to be proactive in defining our response and have this be driven by our values, not our emotions or underlying conditioning. By doing this, it allows us to take control of the situation and respond appropriately. As Covey points out, it is our response to what happens that hurt us, not the event itself.

While there are many real pains and heartbreaks we will experience, the key is our attitudinal response to these situations. Being strong and living by our values even when we are in pain and the world feels like it is crashing down around us.

Being proactive in situations involves using your resourcefulness and initiative. Most people let the world happen to them and react to it. You should strive to be different. Take initiative and seek to bring change to the situation in whatever way you can. If the situation is unchangeable (such as an event in the past), be proactive in changing your attitude towards it.

In being proactive, it’s important to classify the different problems you face in the world and focus on those you can control and influence. We all have a circle of concern: things we are concerned about in the world. Within that, we have a smaller circle that we can influence. We need to ignore that which we cannot affect, in order to focus and make actual changes on those that we can influence.

One thing to watch out for during this process is our language usage. We should avoid wanting to “have” something, which is a reactive mindset (have more money, awards, respect). Instead, try to be something (be loving, hardworking), which are things you can proactively change.

In the process of going about our lives and trying to make proactive changes, we are bound to make mistakes. It is critical to be proactive with these and quickly acknowledge the mistake and take any appropriate action to correct and learn from it.

Through these steps, we can be an agent of positive change in our lives and those around us.

The The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey is one of the best-selling self-help books.

One of the key concepts in this book is to ensure you balance your production (the outcome you want) with your production capacity. While this varies by your context, it is an important reminder to keep up your health, relationships, and general systems in order to be sustainable for the long-term.

One of the challenges Stephen Covey puts to the reader is to share what you’ve learned as you read it, preferably within 48 hours. This is a fantastic tactic to better internalize the concepts, as only through explaining it to others can we ensure we really understand it ourselves.

You can learn more about each habit below:

1: Be Proactive
2: Begin with the end in mind
3: First things first
4: Think win-win
5: Seek first to understand, then be understood
6: Synergize!
7: Sharpen the saw