Habit 3: Put First Things First

from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey (1989)

3 Main Ideas

• Things that matter the most should never be subordinate to things that matter the least. Habit 3: Put First Things First is about self-management. It is the day-to-day process of organizing and managing yourself in order to fulfill your stated values and goals; the things that are important to you.
• Quadrant II activities are agenda items that are not urgent, but are important. A person who focuses on activities that are important, but not urgent is opportunity-minded. They think proactively, preventively, and feed opportunities, while starving problems. Being a Quadrant II person often requires having the strength (independent will) and integrity (followthrough) to subordinate your impulses and engage in activities that are important but have no deadline or sense of urgency. 
• Activities that are important but not urgent include exercising, sticking to a healthy diet, servicing your car regularly, building strong relationships with your spouse and children, reading books, keeping up to date with professional news and innovation, improving your mental and emotional health, etc. 

5 Key Takeaways

• Self-Management. Habit 3 requires you to manage yourself. You are responsible for your life, and you are responsible for the things you need to do to achieve your goals, and to live your life in accordance with your own values.
• Quadrant II. Quadrant II is the heart of effective personal management. It deals with things that are not urgent, but are important. Quadrant II activities are significant, fundamental activities or tasks that prevent situations from developing into crises in the first place. Being a Quadrant II person enables you to be an architect, and not a firefighter. Focusing on Quadrant II activities requires you to prioritize activities that would make a hugely significant positive difference in your personal and professional life.
• Say no to unimportant things. To say “yes” to important Quadrant II priorities, you must say “no” to other unimportant activities, even apparently urgent things. You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage to say “no” to other things. It’s easy to find the courage to say “no” when you have a bigger “yes” burning inside of you. Becoming a Quadrant II person requires you to focus on the things that are actually important to your personal and professional life, and to put those things first. By spending time on things that are important but not urgent, you put the first things first, and are better able to say no to the trivial, the distracting, and the useless. 
• 30 Minutes a Week. Set aside 30 minutes each week to plan your week. Daily planning is insufficient to give you the larger picture and context. Daily planning will ensure that you’re only responding to crises, and not generating forward momentum on the things that are actually important to you. 
• Plan Ahead. Putting first things first requires you to spend the majority of your time in Quadrant II, the paradigm of self-management. It requires you to think about preventing things from becoming urgent, to spend time planning ahead, and to build relationships. Spending time in Quadrant II prevents you from wasting your time on things that are not important, on responding to crises, instead of preventing them in the first place, and places emphasis on building relationships. 

Top Quotes

• Effective management is putting first things first. While leadership decides what “first things” are, it is management that puts them first, day-by-day, moment-by-moment. Management is discipline, carrying it out.  (192)
• That subordination [of impulse] requires a purpose, a mission, a Habit 2 clear sense of direction and value, a burning “yes!” inside that makes it possible to say “no” to other things. It also requires independent will, the power to do something when you don’t want to do it, to be a function of your values rather than a function of the impulse or desire of any given moment. It’s the power to act with integrity to your proactive first creation.  (193)
• Effective people are not problem-minded; they’re opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. They think preventively.  pg. 197
• The way you spend your time is a result of the way you see your time and the way you really see your priorities.  (202)
• As well as empowering you to put first things first, Quadrant II weekly organizing gives you the freedom and the flexibility to handle unanticipated events, to shift appointments if you need to, to savor relationships and interactions with others, to deeply enjoy spontaneous experiences, knowing that you have proactively organized your week to accomplish key goals in every area of your life. (210)

Summary

If Habit 2 was about personal leadership, then Habit 3 is about self-management. Habit 2 (Begin with the End in Mind) is about the first creation, the process of imagining and envisioning our ideal selves. Habit 3 (Put First Things First) is the second creation, the physical creation. It’s the process of ensuring that you work on the things that are most important to you. This is the habit that people struggle with the most.

Busyness has become a status symbol, and many of us are addicted to being busy. We are addicted to urgency. We rush from thing to thing, or appointment to appointment on our calendars, scrolling endlessly, browsing aimlessly on our phones, without taking the time to reflect on whether these things are actually important to us, or mesh with our self-declared values and goals. We respond to things that have deadlines or visible reminders, and pay less attention to things that may not be immediately visible. 

Busy professionals respond to various work deadlines, but fail to pay attention to their marriages or their children. At the end of their careers, they are surprised to end up with distant partners and alienated children. It’s because they failed to make the time for the things that were actually important. They failed to put first things first. 

The solution is to shift your paradigm from one of urgency to one of importance. Habit 3 asks us to be aware of how we spend our time and prioritize the things that are actually important, as opposed to merely urgent. It asks us to spend more time in Quadrant II (things that are important, but not urgent) and less time in Quadrant III (not urgent, not important). 

It becomes easier to say no to the unimportant when you  have a deeper value or goal that is related to your personal mission and vision that is burning inside you. Once you have your why, it becomes easier to clarify the things that are important to you, and to say no to everything else.

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”,

Steve Jobs

Habit 3 is principle-centered. It creates the central paradigm that empowers you to see your time in the context of what is really important and effective.  

It is conscience-directed in that it enables you to organize your life to the best of your ability in harmony with your deepest values. But it also gives you the freedom to peacefully subordinate your schedule to higher values. By integrating your values and long-term goals, it gives direction and purpose to the way you spend each day.

As a result, Habit 3 provides a primary focus on relationships and results, and a secondary focus on time. 

Habit 3 generates a Quadrant II paradigm that empowers you to see through the lens of importance rather than urgency. 

Habit 3: Put First Things First

Principles of Personal Management

• Habit 3: Put First Things First is about self-management. Habit 3 is the second creation, the physical creation. It’s the day-to-day process of fulfilling our values and goals.
• Once you’ve created a personal mission statement for yourself, you then have to manage yourself effectively to create a life congruent with your answers.
• Leadership is primarily right-brained. Management is left-brained.
  • Manage from the left; lead from the right.
• Management is the breaking down, the analysis, the sequencing, the specific application, the time-bound left brain aspect of effective self-government.  (191)

The Power of Independent Will

• Habit 3 relies heavily on the human endowment of independent will.
• Independent will is the ability to make decisions and choices and to act in accordance with them. It is the ability to act rather than to be acted upon, to proactively carry out the program we have developed through the other three endowments (i.e. self-awareness, imagination, conscience). (192)
• Our independent will depends on our level of personal integrity. 
• Personal Integrity is… the value we place on ourselves. It’s our ability to make and keep commitments to ourselves, to “walk our talk.” (192)
• Effective management is putting first things first. While leadership decides what “first things” are, it is management that puts them first, day-by-day, moment-by-moment. Management is discipline, carrying it out.  (192)
• To be an effective self-manager, you need to be able to have integrity, and follow through on what you said you would do, without being prompted, and even when you’re only accountable  to yourself. An effective self-manager carries out their promises, even the ones made only to themselves. 
• If you are an effective manager of yourself, your discipline comes from within; it is a function of your independent will. You are a disciple, a follower, of your own deep values and their source. And you have the will, the integrity, to subordinate your feelings, your impulses, your moods to those values. (192)
• “The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don’t like to do,” he observed. “ They don’t like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose.”  (193) [c.f. “The Common Denominator of Success,” by E. M. Gray]

Four Generations of Time Management

• The challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves. (195)
• 1st Generation: notes, checklists
• 2nd Generation: calendars, appointment books
• 3rd Generation: daily planning, clarifying values, setting priorities and goals
• 4th Generation: expectations focus on preserving and enhancing relationships and on accomplishing results—in short, on maintaining the P/PC Balance.  (195)

The Quadrants

• We spend time in one of four ways
• The 2 factors that define an activity are urgent and important.

The Time Management Matrix

• Urgent
  • Something requires immediate attention. It’s “Now!”  
  • Urgent matters are usually visible. They press on us; they insist on action. They’re often popular with others. They’re usually right in front of us. And often they are pleasant, easy, fun to do. But so often they are unimportant!

• Important
  • Importance has to do with results. If something is important, it contributes to your mission, your values, your high-priority goals. 

The Time Management Matrix – Examples

• We react to urgent matters. Important matters that are not urgent require more initiative, more proactivity. We must act to seize opportunity, to make things happen.  (196)
• Quadrant I is both urgent and important. It deals with significant results that require immediate attention.  (196)
• Activities in Quadrant I are “crises” or “problems.” Effective people try to shrink Quadrant I down to size by spending more time in Quadrant II. 
• People who spend time almost exclusively in Quadrants III and IV basically lead irresponsible lives. Urgent or not, they aren’t important. 

Quadrant II

• Quadrant II is the Quadrant of Quality. It results in improved relationships, high performance, and balance.
• Quadrant II is the heart of effective personal management. It deals with things that are not urgent, but are important.  (197)
• [Quadrant II] deals with things like building relationships, writing a personal mission statement, long-range planning, exercising, preventive maintenance, preparation—all those things we know we need to do, but somehow seldom get around to doing, because they aren’t urgent. (197)
• Effective people are not problem-minded; they’re opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. They think preventively. (197) [c.f. Peter Drucker]
• Effective people have genuine Quadrant I crises and emergencies that require their immediate attention, but the number is comparatively small.  And they focus on the important, but not urgent, high-leverage capacity-building activities of Quadrant II.  (197)
• Activities that are important but not urgent are typically high-leverage capacity-building activities. Examples include include exercising, keeping a healthy diet, servicing your car regularly, building relationships, reading books, keeping up to date with professional news and innovation, improving your mental and emotional health, etc
• Quadrant II activities are significant, fundamental activities or tasks that prevent situations from developing into crises in the first place. Being a Quadrant II person enables you to be an architect, and not a firefighter. 
• Focusing on Quadrant II activities requires you to prioritize activities that would make a hugely significant positive difference in your personal and professional life. It requires you to plan and think ahead, engage in preventive activities that keep situations from developing into crises in the first place.

What It Takes to Say “No”

• We don’t have unlimited time, so the only place to get more time for Quadrant II is from Quadrants III and IV (activities that aren’t important). 
• You need to proactively work on Quadrant II, ie., you need to actively set aside time to engage in Quadrant II activities. Quadrants I (important and urgent) and III (urgent, not important) are usually time-bounded and will pull you in without much prompting. 
• To say “yes” to important Quadrant II priorities, you have to learn to say “no” to other (unimportant) activities, sometimes apparently urgent things.  (200)
• You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage…to say “no” to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger “yes” burning inside. (200)
• Keep in mind that you are always saying “no” to something. If it isn’t to the apparent, urgent things in your life, it is probably to the more fundamental, highly important things. Even when the urgent is good, the good can keep you from your best, keep you from your unique contribution, if you let it.  (200)
• We say “yes” or “no” to things daily, usually many times a day. A center of correct principles and a focus on our personal mission empowers us with wisdom to make those judgments effectively. (201)
• To say “yes” to regular exercise, you must say “no” to watching one more television show. To say “yes” to saving money, you might need to say “no” to eating out for lunch. To say “yes” to a professional development course, you might need to say “no” to a random bar crawl with your friends.
• Quadrant II is a principle-focused paradigm. Effective time and life management depends on being able to organize and execute around balanced priorities and values. 
• The way you spend your time is a result of the way you see your time and the way you really see your priorities.  (202)

The Quadrant II Tool

• Daily planning isn’t sufficient. 
  • It misses important things that can only be seen from a larger perspective.
  • It focuses on the urgent, the “now”. 
• A Quadrant II organizer needs to meet 6 criteria:
  • 1) Coherence: unity between your roles, goals, values, and desires.
  • 2) Balance: create balance in your life
  • 3) Focus: schedule your priorities; don’t prioritize what’s on your schedule
  • 4) People Dimension: deal with people, not just schedules
  • 5) Flexibility
  • 6) Portability
• You need a tool that encourages you, motivates you, actually helps you spend the time you need in Quadrant II, so that you’re dealing with prevention rather than prioritizing crises. (206)
• In my opinion, the best way to do this is to organize your life on a weekly basis. You can still adapt and prioritize on a daily basis, but the fundamental thrust is organizing the week.  (206)
• Organizing on a weekly basis provides much greater balance and context than daily planning. (206)
• The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. And this can best be done in the context of the week. (206)

Becoming a Quadrant II Self-Manager

• Step 1: Identify Roles
  • List the various roles that you play in your life: wife, husband, mother, father, son, daughter, worker, boss, professional, employee, manager, coach, etc
• Step 2: Select Goals
  • Identify 1 or 2 goals you’d like to accomplish in each role for the next 7 days
  • At least some of these goals should reflect Quadrant II activities
  • Should ideally tie to the longer-term goals you’ve personally identified 
• Step 3: Schedule
  • Schedule time in the upcoming week to work on these goals
  • Designate one day a week (e.g Sunday) to review your weekly plan
• Step 4: Adapt
  • Use the daily plan to adapt, prioritize or respond to unanticipated events or activities. 

Delegation

• The key to effective management is delegation.  
• Transferring responsibility to other skilled and trained people enables you to give your energies to other high-leverage activities.  (215)
• Be prepared to delegate Quadrant III activities (urgent, not important) like meetings, emails, phone calls, some reports, housecleaning, etc
• The ability to delegate to others is the main difference between the roles of manager and independent producer,  (215)
• When a person sets up and works with and through people and systems to produce golden eggs, that person becomes a manager in the interdependent sense (215)

Two Kinds of Delegation

• Gofer delegation
  • Micromanagement
  • Top-down, hierarchical
  • You dictate everything that needs to be done to others
  • Focuses on methods, not results

• Stewardship delegation
  • Focused on results, instead of methods
  • Makes people responsible for results; it offers them choice and freedom, and how they use to achieve those results is within their own discretion

Stewardship Delegation

• Involves clear, upfront mutual understanding and commitment in 5 areas:
  • Desired Results
  • Guidelines
  • Resources
  • Accountability
  • Consequences
• The steward becomes his own boss, governed by a conscience that contains the commitment to agreed-upon desired results. But it also releases his creative energies toward doing whatever is necessary in harmony with correct principles to achieve those desired results.  (223)

How to Put First Things First

• Put first things first: determine what items in your life fall within Quadrant II, (important, not urgent)
• Organize your next week. 
  • Set aside 30 minutes each week to plan your week
  • Write down your roles and goals for the week
  • Transfer the goals to a specific action plan for the week
• Dedicate a day of the week to reviewing and reflecting on your weekly action plan
  • Set up a regular time to do the weekly review
• Delegate agenda items that are not critical to other people; don’t feel obligated to do everything yourself.

Recommended Reading

You may also enjoy the following books:

• Start with Why by Simon Sinek

If you found this summary helpful, just click here  to share it!