Stephen R. Covey's «The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People» isn't a quick read. It doesn't want to be either. For Covey, success is based on habitual formation of the character - comparable to the cycle of sowing and harvesting and about as time-consuming.

In this eight-part series, I'm going to present the key concepts of the book and what I've learned from them. This is Part 4 of the series.

[Note: If you happen to be a follower of David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD), the chapter discussed in this posting provides some interesting ideas on weekly reviews and on how to prioritize your next steps.]

An overview of the series can be found here.

Efficient management

It is easier to learn management than to learn leadership. Leadership is about developing an inner compass, whereas management is about going into the direction suggested by that compass. Leadership is about being effective (knowing and reaching your goals, at all), management is about reaching your goals as efficiently as possible. Covey uses the ladder analogy:  » Read more

Flourescent Highlighter pens 1 © Craig JewellHow can we be expected to handle priorities if Wikipedia doesn't even define what a «priority» is?

Priorities come in so many flavors: top priorities; priorities A, B or C; urgent or important priorities. Yet they seem to be so elusive that the Wiktionary, too, just tells us: «priority (plural priorities) - 1. An item's relative importance. …».

Obviously, they are meant to help us. In David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) method, they're one criterion out of four that we use to determine what to tackle next from our list of next actions. David summarized the issue once on his  » Read more