PDF Summary:The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey

Do you want to make your life better? Are you struggling in your personal or professional life, your interactions with other people, your life balance, or your life’s purpose?

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People provides an inside-out approach to improving yourself and your life. This method entails examining and adjusting your character, your motives, and how you see the world in order to change how you behave and how you interact with others. Learn how to best focus your time, define your personal mission, and build productive relationships with other people.

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Habit 3: Prioritize Important Over Urgent

Habit Description

Prioritize your time and actions in order to live up to your personal mission statement. (Shortform note: To help you apply Covey’s advice, we’ve included organizational strategies later in this guide from the more detailed, systematic approach described in Getting Things Done.)

Why It Matters

To prioritize the tasks that will have the biggest positive impact on your life, Covey promotes a time management matrix originally designed by President Eisenhower that categorizes tasks based on their urgency and importance (meaning that they contribute to your goals, values, and personal mission statement). The matrix has four task categories, which Covey refers to as quadrants:

1. Category 1: Urgent and Important—The crises and problems in this category eat up your time and distract you from preventing future crises, creating a vicious cycle.
2. Category 2: Not Urgent, but Important—This is where you should spend most of your time, because it includes activities that could easily be put off, but that bring great benefits in the long term (like exercising).
3. Category 3: Urgent, but not Important—These activities are typically things that other people want you to do but that aren’t important to you.
4. Category 4: Neither Urgent nor Important—These leisure and entertainment activities contribute nothing to your life, and effective people tend to avoid them.

Develop Time Management Skills to Complement the Tools

Research suggests that this matrix is a useful tool, but it doesn’t develop all of the three skills necessary for effective time management, each of which is equally important:

• Awareness that your available time is limited—the matrix doesn’t measure the accuracy of your time estimates for tasks, nor does it improve how you allocate your limited time.

• Arrangement of your time through goal-setting, planning, and scheduling—the matrix is most effective in this category because it helps you prioritize the most important tasks to schedule accordingly.

• Adaptation of your time while carrying out tasks, particularly when you’re interrupted and have to shift priorities—the matrix potentially improves adaptation by providing a system to gauge priorities on the fly if your work is interrupted with an urgent request.

How To

Covey asserts that weekly planning is the most effective way to manage your time and achieve your goals: A weekly schedule is narrow enough to ensure important tasks get done promptly, and it’s broad enough to be flexible when things come up unexpectedly.

Follow these steps to create your weekly plan:

1. Identify your roles (such as employee or volunteer).
2. Identify one or two goals you want to achieve for each role in the next week.
3. Assign a day to accomplish each goal.
4. Schedule time for activities that renew and revitalize you. (More on this in Habit 7.)
5. Build in open, unscheduled time for the unexpected.
6. When things come up unexpectedly, evaluate how they fit your goals and schedule.

Prioritize and Get Things Done

Habit 3 takes a big-picture approach to time management, but the Getting Things Done (GTD) system offers more specific advice on how to gather, assess, organize, and address the relentless flow of emails and demands. The five steps of the GTD system are:

• Capture every problem, idea, reminder, and to-do in a designated in-tray.

• Clarify what you need to do with each item: throw it away, keep it for reference, delegate it, do it, schedule it, or save it to reconsider later.

• Organize each item: File reference items and things to reconsider, hand off delegated items, write action items on a to-do list, and put scheduled items on a calendar.

• Review your calendar and to-do list frequently; your calendar determines the structure of your days and weeks, while your to-do list tells you what to tackle between scheduled appointments.

• Engage with the task; in other words, get it done.

Rather than creating a weekly schedule, as Covey recommends, the GTD system emphasizes a weekly review to update to-do lists and calendars and review scheduled appointments and priorities for the week ahead.

Habit 4: Seek Mutual Benefits

Habit Description

When tackling a problem or negotiation with someone, always strive to find a mutually beneficial solution.

Why It Matters

While Habits 1-3 focus on personal effectiveness, Covey says that Habits 4-6 focus on building interdependent (or collaborative) success through strong relationships and effective interactions.

Habit 4 is the first step: Approach every interaction as an opportunity to find a mutually beneficial outcome, which Covey calls a “Win/Win” mindset.

• Description: This mindset values cooperation over competition—one person’s success doesn’t come at the expense of another’s.
• Benefits: It strengthens the relationship between the people involved—improving the quality of future collaborations—and leads to more innovative solutions.

(Shortform note: Although the idea of finding a mutually beneficial solution seems appealing, negotiation coach Jim Camp argues that win/win often pressures both parties to rush to any agreement rather than doing the haggling necessary to reach the best deal.)

How To

Once you’ve adopted the right mindset and you sit down to negotiate or work together, how do you actually arrive at a mutually beneficial solution? Covey offers these tips:

1. Try to understand the other person’s perspective. We’ll explain how to do this in Habit 5. (Shortform note: Rather than simply understanding it, Never Split the Difference author Chris Voss promotes changing the other person’s perspective in your favor.)
2. Describe each person’s biggest concerns as objectively as possible. (Shortform note: Voss suggests a “calculated empathy” tactic in which you name the other person’s feelings to increase trust and rapport for the purpose of getting what you want.)
3. Identify what results constitute a “win” for each person. (Shortform note: Voss says desires and fears often distract people from what they really want in negotiations.)
4. Determine a new solution that achieves those results. (Shortform note: Getting to Yes authors Roger Fisher and William Ury suggest using objective criteria—like market values—to measure how a solution benefits each side.)

Habit 5: Listen and Understand the Other First

Habit Description

When communicating with others, Covey urges you to try to understand their perspective before asking them to understand yours.

Why It Matters

Covey points out that you can’t reach a mutually beneficial solution without first understanding the other person’s interests. This requires empathic listening, or striving to understand the other person’s perspectives by interpreting what they’re saying as well as how they feel. (Shortform note: Subsequent research has found that, beyond empathy, effective listening involves giving supportive, constructive responses.)

How To

Covey suggests you practice empathic listening with these exercises:

• People-watch to practice interpreting nonverbal cues. Observe an interaction from afar. What can you discern about people’s emotions based solely on their body language?
• Practice switching views. In a debate or negotiation, try to describe the situation from the other person’s perspective. Then, explain your point through their lens.
• Ask a friend or family member for feedback. Explain the concept of empathic listening, and ask them to tell you in a week how well you listened empathically to them.

Specific Strategies for Empathic Listening

Covey’s exercises allow you to practice empathic listening, but he doesn’t provide many specific strategies. Supplement Covey’s exercises with these practical strategies for empathic listening from the Crisis Prevention Center:

• Signal that you're listening with your body language and gestures like nodding.

• Withhold your judgments. You don’t have to agree with the other person, but you must release your opinions long enough to understand the other person’s perspective.

• Paraphrase what you think the other person is saying, and ask them if you’re correct.

• Embrace silence. Sometimes your presence is enough to make the other person feel supported.

• Don’t cut the conversation short. Make sure the other person has expressed everything they wanted to say.

Habit 6: Collaborate to Create Possibilities

Habit Description

Covey contends that collaborating (creating what he calls “synergy”) with another person enables you to achieve more than either of you could alone.

Why It Matters

Covey believes that collaboration creates outcomes greater than the sum of the parts, as in 1+1 = 3 or more (for example, one singer plus another singer creates a harmony). This is possible because the relationship itself adds value by creating the opportunity for collaboration.

The mutually beneficial mindset from Habit 4 and empathic listening from Habit 5 foster trust and goodwill, which are necessary for effective communication and collaboration. Covey suggests that the collaborative process then strengthens the relationship, which benefits future collaborations. (Shortform note: Subsequent research has revealed that the connection between empathy, trust, and collaboration is neurological: When people feel trusted, their brains release higher levels of oxytocin, which makes them more trustworthy and trusting. As a result, in high-trust environments, people become more productive and collaborative.)

How To

To effectively collaborate, Covey says you need “internal synergy.” In other words, be both analytical and intuitive, because life can be logical as well as emotional.

(Shortform note: To supplement Covey’s advice, which is fairly abstract, managers can use specific strategies to increase trust and promote collaboration on their teams. These tactics include encouraging relationship-building among teammates, giving people the freedom to choose how they work, and celebrating successes publicly and promptly.)

Habit 7: Practice Self-Renewal

Habit Description

Covey’s final habit, self-renewal, maintains your well-being so that you can continue doing the work of Habits 1-6.

Why It Matters

Covey asserts that keeping yourself mentally and physically healthy prevents burnout, supports productivity, and actually improves your overall efficiency and effectiveness, creating an upward spiral of growth. Self-renewal also helps you stay disciplined and focused on your goals and values.

(Shortform note: A key benefit that Covey overlooks is that self-renewal weakens the negative impacts of stress. This reframes the value of self-care: It doesn’t make you feel better by masking or distracting from your issues, but rather by helping you get through them.)

How To

Covey advises practicing four aspects of self-renewal:

1. Physical—Eat well, exercise, and get enough sleep and relaxation.
2. Spiritual—This can include praying, meditating, reading, and spending time in nature.
3. Mental—Read, write, and expose yourself to new information.
4. Social/emotional—Since emotional health is so closely tied with social interactions, Covey argues that this form of self-renewal actually comes from practicing Habits 4-6.

Focus on What’s Most Important

Minimalists have developed similar categories, not for the express purpose of self-renewal, but rather as a way to focus on the most important things in order to eliminate excess and live a simpler life. However, decluttering your life in these areas could also contribute to self-renewal. Minimalism authors Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus describe five key values (some of which overlap Covey’s four dimensions):

• Health—Eat well and exercise.

• Relationships—Drop unproductive relationships and invest in meaningful ones.

• Passions—Pursue a mission-driven passion instead of career and status.

• Growth—Make small, daily changes that contribute to substantial growth over time.

• Contribute to others—Serve society and help others grow.

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