![]() A new gig seems to have started at Franklin, 5 Choices, and their 5 Choices Weekly Planner looks like a reasonably good format for the weekly planning the Covey approach uses. Since I’m going to start again, I wanted to get a good weekly planner. updateįranklin (of Franklin Planners) acquired the Covey organization some time back, with the name changed to FranklinCovey, but the site seems to be called Franklin Planner. However, you could also get a blank bound book (like a composition book or a Moleskine notebook) and do the exercises in that rather than writing in the Workbook.Īlso, Carl in the comments below notes that The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens is a better written book. The spiral-bound version is the most expensive, but probably the easiest to use since the exercises have you writing in the workbook. UPDATE: I just stumbled across The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Personal Workbook, and in looking at it, I think it would be helpful in applying and adapting the habits to your personal situation. However, the synopsis is in no way a replacement for the book, and I strongly recommend that you read the book itself. The synopsis is incomplete, but it helps clarify some parts of the book that are obscure. Download the brief synopsis (PDF) using the link at the bottom of this post and read the synopsis before or as you read the book. The ideas in the book are indeed valuable, but transcribing a talk given with charts and slides can make for occasional difficult reading. 1592), essayist: “Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.”) Habit 1 specifically deals with locus of control, discussed in some detail in this article.Ĭovey’s book is based on talks he gave on 7 habits that he found were common to a variety of highly effective people. (In this connection, note this comment by Michel de Montaigne (b. (See Martin Seligman’s excellent Learned Optimism for more on how that works.) In reading Covey’s book, I learned how to separate things that I could not influence from things that I could, and once I focused my attention and energy on the latter, I started feeling better as I regained locus of control. This led to the feeling of helplessness, which definitely leads to burnout. The cause, I eventually (and with some help) realized, was that I had started “owning” things over which I had no control-for example, decisions made by corporate, several levels above me. ![]() ![]() I initially found Covey’s method helpful at a time when I was suffering a terrific case of worker burnout. I think Covey’s method - to spend time on Sunday making a plan for the week ahead - is spot-on. We can keep a week in mind because it’s 7 chunks of time, and that’s within our capacity. Perhaps that’s related to the capacity of our short-term memory ( 7 chunks of data, plus or minus 2). Not so urgent, they pass by - at first gradually and then suddenly - so we drift easily from having lots of time to having not enough time. It seems that a week is a chunk of time we can get a grip on, but a month? or a year? Those get away from us. And, I discovered, if I stay within budget each week, at the end of the month I am within budget for the month. One additional thought on the magic of the short-term (and thus immediate/urgent) time horizon of one week: I found it very difficult to stay within my monthly budget on groceries and the like, so I changed my routine to focus on staying within my weekly budget. There’s more to the approach than that, but that is one key benefit: a way to overcome a blind spot in our daily routines. Perhaps as a result of evolutionary pressures, we are highly sensitized to urgent situations (whether important, like that bear coming toward us, or unimportant, like an itch we can’t quite reach), whereas situations that lack urgency are easily postponed and ignored from one day to the next even when they are important (for example, making a will).Ĭovey sets out a protocol that (among other things) ensures that you identify what is important (in terms of your own life and your own goals) and then has you put into your schedule each week steps toward goals that are important but not urgent, thus making sure important things are accomplished even when they lack urgency. I recently understood one reason the system Stephen Covey describes in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People works so well. After Christopher Edwards, revised by author. ![]()
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