Seven habits of highly effective people - Stephen R. Covey [73]
Having identified roles and set goals, you can translate each goal to a specific day of the week, either as a priority item or, even better, as a specific appointment. You can also check your annual or monthly calendar for any appointments you may have previously made and evaluate their importance in the context of your goals, transferring those you decide to keep to your schedule and making plans to
reschedule or cancel others.
As you study the following weekly worksheet, observe how each of the 19 most important, often Quadrant II, goals has been scheduled or translated into a specific action plan. In addition, notice the box labeled "Sharpen the Saw TM" that provides a place to plan vital renewing Quadrant II activities in each of the four human dimensions that will be explained in Habit 7. Even with time set aside to accomplish 19 important goals during the week, look at the amount of remaining unscheduled space on the worksheet! 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.
Daily Adapting: With Quadrant II weekly organizing, daily planning becomes more a function of daily adapting, or prioritizing activities and responding to unanticipated events, relationships, and experiences in a meaningful way.
Taking a few minutes each morning to review your schedule can put you in touch with the value-based decisions you made as you organized the week as well as unanticipated factors that may have come up. As you overview the day, you can see that your roles and goals provide a natural prioritization that grows out of your innate sense of balance. It is a softer, more right-brain prioritization that ultimately comes out of your sense of personal mission. You may still find that the third-generation A, B, C or 1, 2, 3 prioritization gives needed order to daily activities. It would be a false dichotomy to say that activities are either important or they aren't. They are obviously on a continuum, and some important activities are more important than others. In the context of weekly organizing, third-generation prioritization gives order to daily focus. But trying to prioritize activities before you even know how they relate to your sense of personal mission and how they fit into the balance of your life is not effective. You may be prioritizing and accomplishing things you don't want or need to be doing at all.
Can you begin to see the difference between organizing your week as a principle-centered, Quadrant II manager and planning your days as an individual centered on something else? Can you begin to sense the tremendous difference the Quadrant II focus would make in your current level of effectiveness?
Having experienced the power of principle-centered Quadrant II organizing in my own life and having seen it transform the lives of hundreds of other people, I am persuaded it makes a difference --a quantum positive difference. And the more completely weekly goals are tied into a wider framework of correct principles and into a personal mission statement, the greater the increase in effectiveness will be.
Living It
Returning once more to the computer metaphor, if Habit 1 says "You're the programmer" and Habit 2 says "Write the program," then Habit 3 says "Run the program," "Live the program." And living it is primarily a function of our independent will, our self-discipline, our integrity, and commitment --not to short-term goals and schedules or to the impulse of the moment, but to the correct principles and our own deepest values, which give meaning and context to our goals, our schedules, and our lives. As you go through your week, there will undoubtedly be times when your integrity will be placed on the line. The popularity of reacting to the urgent