The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen Covey

Much had been said here on Covey's 7 Habits, however recently signed myself up for a 7 Habits workshop offered at work. Was a semi reluctant to do so at first and decided to give it a go as the Covey work is sound. Being a work orientated course, it was arranged as a 7 Habits online (covid) presentation, including work groups. There is a blend of personal and work that would somewhat disorientate attendees due to the questions (e.g. are they talking about work or non work).

The course is a FranklinCovey course, and Stephen's son seems to introduce the course from the FranklinCovey base. Resources included were extensive, with life/day planners focused on the 7 Habits, videos by Covey and booklets. There was also a a 7 Habits app (if not known) that I ended up downloading and have not really explored it to potential, however it has good messaging that one can reference on a day to day basis if need be. The app is called FranklinCovey Living the 7 Habits. Here is what it looks like:

iPhone Screenshots​

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Description​


FranklinCovey Living The 7 Habits app, winner of the eLearning Guild's "Guild Masters' Choice Award" at the 2014 mLearning DemoFest.

Living the 7 Habits is designed for people who have completed or who are about to attend a FranklinCovey 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Signature Edition 4.0 work session.

This app includes materials to be used during the course and as references and self-study tools after completing the course. The app includes the following:

Boosters: daily reminders of principles and content from the 7 Habits work session.

Mission Statement Builder: as explained in the work session, your Mission Statement is key to deciding where you want to focus your time, attention, and energy. This tool provides prompts that will help you build your personal Mission Statement.

Insights to 100 Challenges: excerpts from the 25th Anniversary edition of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People book by Stephen R. Covey that address common challenges that people face in their efforts to become more effective personally, at home, and at work.

Community: access to an online community of people who have gone through a 7 Habits work session and are working to make themselves more effective

Integrated into the course (which is another modality - separate) is The Four Quadrants - Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4 (work related - example here). Had taken this course a number of years ago and it looks to orientating one into a more ideal Q2. Some people (self included), due to the nature of their work, have difficulties shifting out from Q1 - in fact on the one hand, the employer may offer this thinking to help shift one from Q1 to Q2 (and certainly out of Q3 and Q4), and on the other hand the very nature of the job makes it near impossible (Q1 is reactive), which is a bit of a contradiction that, and they know it.

Anyway, this is Q business is blended into the course, however the focus remained on the 7 Habits.

Overall it was a good experience and it was fun interacting with others.
 
Today I stumbled upon the following article by Oliver Burkeman. He also wrote a book on being effective and time management. But since I haven't read the book, only the article, and haven't seen him being mentioned on the forum, I share the article on this thread.

He talks about a 3-4 hours productivity/creativity window per day that is also based on science. That if your work or anything you choose to do requires concentration and thinking, you only have 3-4 good hours to do it. If you have an official work and you have to continue working, then dedicate the rest of the time to answering e-mails, filling reports, meeting, etc. But 3-4 hours of proper work is all you get, and according to him and others, no need for more.

It can also be divided into parts of 90+90 and 1 hour more (if you want 4 hours) during a day, The point is to spend this time on the activity of your choosing without any interruptions and diversions, and it's enough to have a good progress for one day.


There aren't many hard-and-fast rules of time management that apply to everyone, always, regardless of situation or personality (which is why I tend to emphasise general principles instead). But I think there might be one: you almost certainly can't consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day.

As I've written before, it's positively spooky how frequently this three-to-four hour range crops up in accounts of the habits of the famously creative. Charles Darwin, at work on the theory of evolution in his study at Down House, toiled for two 90-minute periods and one one-hour period per day; the mathematical genius Henri Poincaré worked for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Ingmar Bergman and many more all basically followed suit, as Alex Pang explains in his book Rest (where he also discusses research supporting the idea: this isn't just a matter of cherry-picking examples to prove a point).

Before you jump down my throat, I realise, of course, that many such figures relied on wives and/or servants to keep their lives on track. And in any case they didn't live in an era like ours, where those in high-status jobs feel they have to work as relentlessly as anyone. The moral here isn't that you ought to be in a position to rise from your desk, once your four hours are up, then spend the rest of the day playing tennis and drinking cocktails. (Though if you can, I say go for it.)

The real lesson – or one of them – is that it pays to use whatever freedom you do have over your schedule not to "maximise your time" or "optimise your day", in some vague way, but specifically to ringfence three or four hours of undisturbed focus (ideally when your energy levels are highest). Stop assuming that the way to make progress on your most important projects is to work for longer. And drop the perfectionistic notion that emails, meetings, digital distractions and other interruptions ought ideally to be whittled away to practically nothing. Just focus on protecting four hours – and don't worry if the rest of the day is characterised by the usual scattered chaos.

Pathological productivity

The other, arguably more important lesson isn't so much a time management tactic as an internal psychological move: to give up demanding more of yourself than three or four hours of daily high-quality mental work. That's an emphasis that gets missed, I think, in the current conversation about overwork and post-pandemic burnout. Yes, it's true we live in a system that demands too much of us, leaves no time for rest, and makes many feel as though their survival depends on working impossible hours. But it's also true that we're increasingly the kind of people who don't want to rest – who get antsy and anxious if we don't feel we're being productive. The usual result is that we push ourselves beyond the sane limits of daily activity, when doing less would have been more productive in the long run.

How far you can check out of the culture of unproductive busywork depends on your situation, of course. But regardless of your situation, you can choose not to collaborate with it. You can abandon the delusion that if you just managed to squeeze in a bit more work, you'd finally reach the commanding status of feeling "in control" and "on top of everything" at last. The truly valuable skill here isn't the capacity to push yourself harder, but to stop and recuperate despite the discomfort of knowing that work remains unfinished, emails unanswered, other people's demands unfulfilled.

That's the spirit embodied by one monk at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico, interviewed by the writer Jonathan Malesic for his forthcoming book The End of Burnout, which I've been enjoying. The monks' daily work period lasts (can you guess?) three hours, ending at 12.40pm. Malesic writes: "I asked Fr Simeon, a monk who spoke with a confidence cultivated through the years he spent as a defence attorney, what you do when the 12:40 bell rings but you feel that your work is undone.

"'You get over it,' he replied."
 
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