1-Page Summary

In First Things First, Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, presents a time management approach that focuses on priorities, or “first things.” This approach teaches you to use your time effectively rather than efficiently. Using your time effectively means focusing on what you’re spending your time on by prioritizing tasks that have the most impact on your long-term goals, rather than how much time you’re spending on each task.

(Shortform note: In The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss tackles the idea of effectiveness versus efficiency in a business context, rather than a personal context. He adds that companies typically focus on efficiency (how much work you get done) because it’s easier to measure, but this gives an unclear picture of how well the company is doing—finishing a large number of unimportant tasks makes the company look productive, but doesn’t move it any closer to its goals.)

The Significance vs. Pressure Graph

Two factors determine how you spend your time: significance and pressure. A task can be significant, pressing, both, or neither. Covey’s method of time management emphasizes only doing significant tasks, rather than spending time on tasks that are merely pressing.

All of our activities fall into one of the four zones of the significance vs. pressure graph:

firstthingsfirst_graph.png

Zone 1 is both significant and pressing. This zone contains emergencies and problems that require your immediate attention. This can include health emergencies, a work deadline, or a broken-down car.

Zone 2 is significant, but not pressing. This zone is where you do long-term planning, relationship building, and personal leadership activities like assessing your progress toward goals.

Zone 3 is pressing, but not significant. Covey warns that the urgency of Zone 3 activities can make them appear important, but they don’t actually help you achieve your goals (for example, making phone calls or going to unimportant meetings).

Zone 4 is neither significant nor pressing. Zone 4 tasks include watching mindless television shows and scrolling through social media. Covey explains that recreational activities don’t belong here, because true recreation is a restorative and valuable Zone 2 activity.

Background Info: The Eisenhower Matrix

Covey’s graph is closely based on the famous Eisenhower Matrix, developed by US President Dwight Eisenhower. The Eisenhower Matrix also suggests methods for dealing with the tasks in each zone:

Zone 3 and Zone 4 activities add little value to your life, so Covey says that you should limit time spent in these quadrants. Also, while Zone 1 activities are inevitable, aim to spend most of your time in Zone 2.

The first step toward spending more time in Zone 2 is to recognize when urgent tasks are not significant and stop doing them. With practice, Covey promises that you’ll eventually shift to a significance-based mindset and focus on doing the things that are most important to you.

(Shortform note: To figure out what’s significant to you, it might help to think about how you’d define success for yourself. A Psychology Today article describes how four business executives defined success, and though their answers varied widely, the common thread was that success meant working toward a goal that brought them fulfillment.)

Shift to a Significance-Based Approach

Covey says three principles should guide your shift to a significance-based approach.

1. Fulfill your four essential needs: Covey believes that every person’s four essential needs are survival, connection, learning, and giving back. Humans get a sense of fulfillment only through satisfying these four fundamental needs—and we meet these needs through Zone 2 (significant but not pressing) activities.

Why Are These Essential Needs?

Covey’s essential needs are all things hardwired into our biology because they helped our ancestors to survive. In his book The Selfish Gene, scientist Richard Dawkins explains in much greater detail how these needs (and other traits) are passed down through generations.

2. Understand universal principles: Universal principles include integrity, moderation, self-discipline, loyalty, responsibility, honesty, and patience. Covey asserts that these principles give you direction and context for where you are now and how to reach your destination, so activities that align with universal principles are Zone 2 activities.

What Makes a Principle Positive?

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, author Mark Manson says that all positive values share three qualities:

All of Covey’s “universal principles” meet these three criteria, and you can use Manson’s criteria as a guide to finding values that speak to you.

3. Understand the four human gifts: Covey’s third step for changing to a significance-based approach to life is understanding the four unique human gifts: self-awareness (the ability to think about your thoughts and actions), morality (your internal compass), creativity (your capacity to imagine new possibilities), and willpower (your ability to choose your actions).

Tara Brach’s “Essential Pause”

One way to bring your unique human gifts to bear is through what Tara Brach describes in Radical Acceptance as the “essential pause.” Instead of immediately reacting to a situation, Brach suggests taking a moment to consider what’s happening, how it’s impacting you in that moment, and what you should do about it.

In other words, in that moment of pause, you can ask yourself:

And finally, you would use your willpower to enact the response you’ve chosen.

Zone 2 Scheduling

Now that you understand the significance-based mindset, it’s time to look at how you can put it into practice through Zone 2 scheduling. This six-step time management system maximizes your personal and professional growth by helping you prioritize Zone 2 activities.

Accomplish More by Doing Less

In The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, leadership expert Robin Sharma suggests managing your time by doing less, rather than more. Covey hints at this idea by talking about effectiveness (what you do) vs. efficiency (how much you do), but Sharma states it more directly.

Sharma also references the “80/20 Rule” (sometimes called the Pareto Principle), a rule of thumb that 80% of outcomes stem from just 20% of what you do. Therefore, the key to getting the most value out of your time is to identify which parts of your life fall into that 20%, and to devote most of your time to those.

At its core, this advice is the same as Covey’s Zone 2 organizing process: Figure out what’s most important to you, and forget everything else.

Step 1: Identify Your Long-Term Vision and Personal Mission

The first step of Covey’s process is to identify what’s most important to you, what gives your life meaning, and what you want to achieve in your life. One way to clarify these priorities, or “first things,” is through a personal mission statement, a written document in which you outline your guiding principles and long-term goals. As you create a personal mission statement, Covey suggests asking yourself:

Find Your Dominant Question

By crafting a mission statement and keeping it at the forefront of your mind, you’re priming your brain with the question, “How can I fulfill my mission?” That question will encourage you to subconsciously look for answers and to consciously make choices that bring you closer to your goals.

Limitless author Jim Kwik calls these types of thoughts dominant questions: difficult or complicated questions that prime your mind to look for answers or relevant information. For instance, if you’re in the market for a new car and suddenly notice car ads everywhere, Kwik would say it’s because your mind is looking for the answer to your current dominant question (“Which car should I get?”).

Step 2: Identify Your Roles

Everyone has many different roles in life, such as spouse, son or daughter, brother or sister, father or mother, friend, professional, and individual. Covey says that when people feel dissatisfied, it’s often because they excel in one or two roles at the expense of the others. That’s why you must identify and address each of your roles as you set your personal mission and manage your time to work toward that mission.

Make a list of your roles (try to keep the number of roles to seven or fewer).

Counterpoint: Maybe It’s Not About You

For many people, envisioning and then creating the life that they want for themselves is the most powerful motivation imaginable. However, some people have trouble getting motivated while thinking only of their own benefit—something that Covey addresses in a roundabout way when he notes that our roles only exist in terms of other people (parent, teacher, employee, and so on). So, if you don’t find improving your own life to be a compelling motivation, it may help to focus instead on how you can improve others’ lives by fulfilling your various roles.

In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius asserts that each individual life is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. However, that isn’t meant to be discouraging or degrading—rather, Aurelius argues that if our own lives are insignificant, then we must exist to serve others and improve the world around us.

Step 3: Set Zone 2 Goals for Each Role

The next step of Covey’s process is to think of Zone 2 (important but not pressing) goals for each of the roles you’ve listed. Focus on goals you can do in the next seven days, but be sure that they reflect your personal mission and make a significant, long-term difference. For example, in your role as a parent, you might schedule quality time with your kids. In your role at work, you could allot time for long-term strategizing.

Once you’ve written down your goals for this week, Covey urges you to ask yourself:

Learn From Your Old Roles

Another word for “role” is “relationship.” With that view, by identifying each role, Covey is prompting us to think about our relationships with other people and what we hope to get out of them.

In Minimalism, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus assert that you can improve your relationships by examining your past relationships. Each past relationship carries important lessons that you can carry with you to improve your present and future relationships. For example, if you once had a romantic partner who used you as an emotional crutch and never gave that support to you when you needed it, that’s a red flag that you now know to watch out for as you define your roles and expectations. As you set goals for your roles, consider how the lessons learned in past relationships can guide how you shape and pursue your mission.

Step 4: Schedule Your Zone 2 Goals Each Week

A key aspect of effectively setting goals and managing your time is choosing the right time frame for your planning. Covey suggests planning within the framework of a week because it balances a big-picture perspective with day-to-day actionables.

When planning your week, Covey urges you to start with important Zone 2 tasks. If you schedule Zone 2 tasks into your week first, urgent matters will fit in around them; but if you first attend to the Zone 1 (significant and pressing) and Zone 3 (pressing but not significant) activities, you’re likely to run out of room for your Zone 2 goals.

Take the goals you listed in Step 3 and schedule them into your week. Then, start adding in the Zone 1 tasks you need to accomplish. As you’re doing this, be sure not to schedule every minute of each day. Covey’s method of time management requires you to maintain flexibility in your schedule for unexpected events and opportunities that will inevitably come up.

Evaluate Your Progress

In The 12 Week Year, CEO Brian P. Moran also pushes for weekly schedules as crucial steps toward long-term goals. However, he adds two more steps to ensure that your weekly plans are effective and get carried out properly:

Step 5: Tackle Each Day Within the Context of Your Weekly Goals

As you move through your week, Covey warns that you’ll face unexpected changes in your schedule and will need to make decisions in the moment about how to proceed. He offers a few things you can do to help you stay in line with your weekly goals and priorities.

  1. Start each morning by reviewing what’s on your schedule for that day.
  2. As you preview the day, prioritize the tasks you have scheduled. Evaluate which are Zone 1 (significant and pressing) and Zone 2 activities, and look out for Zone 3 (pressing but not significant) activities that have made it into your schedule.
  3. Go through your day’s activities and look for time-sensitive commitments. Tasks that aren’t time-sensitive can be rescheduled if unexpected emergencies come up.

(Shortform note: In The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, Robin Sharma provides us with a useful image that highlights the importance of these morning check-ins: Sharma says that purpose is like a lighthouse guiding you through dark and dangerous waters. Much like Covey, Sharma believes that a clear purpose in life will guide you to the right decisions in uncertain situations. Your daily and weekly goals are like that lighthouse guiding you through the choppy waters of day-to-day decisions.)

Step 6: Review and Learn From Your Week

At the end of the week, Covey says to stop and consider how the week went. Did you achieve your goals? How did you handle spur-of-the-moment decisions? Did you keep your first things first?

He also suggests that at the end of each month or quarter, you reflect on patterns in the weeks that have passed. Reflecting on your patterns of success or failure and whether your expectations are realistic helps you make and achieve your goals more effectively going forward.

Learn How to Learn

These weekly and quarterly reflections require you to learn from your experience. In Limitless, Jim Kwik describes three crucial components of learning (no matter what it is you’re trying to learn):

Finding Win-Win Solutions

Covey’s time management approach can also help you set goals and create management systems as a team. However, developing a vision and establishing priorities for a group has unique challenges. This is, in part, because most people approach group work and negotiation with a “win-lose” mindset—if you win, someone else must lose.

Covey says that to reach your goals in our modern interdependent world, you need to change how you think about winning. Winning doesn’t mean someone else loses—winning means accomplishing your goals, and you can accomplish more if you cooperate rather than compete.

The Infinite Game Mindset

If you are stuck in a “win-lose” mindset, you’re thinking in what Simon Sinek would call “finite game” terms: For you to win, someone else must lose—and if someone else wins, that means you’ve lost. In The Infinite Game, Sinek discusses the difference between finite games (games that end when somebody wins) and the titular infinite games (games that never end).

Sinek believes that things like your career, your family, and your romantic relationships are infinite games: For example, there’s (hopefully) no point where you declare that you’ve “won” a relationship and end it. Instead, the objective in an infinite game is to do as well as possible, and to keep playing for as long as you can.

How to Create a Solution Where Everybody Wins

There are three steps to Covey’s “everybody wins” leadership process:

1. Approach the problem with a group-based mindset: Covey’s first step is actually a way of thinking rather than a specific action. To create wins for everybody, you need to first acknowledge that individual success at the expense of the group isn’t true success.

(Shortform note: It’s an oft-cited fact that any percent of zero is zero. If the group as a whole fails, it won’t matter what percentage of the effort you contributed or what percentage of the rewards you think you’re entitled to—you’ll still end up with nothing.)

2. Listen first, then speak: Covey’s second step involves listening and seeking to understand the other person’s point of view. Don’t speak until you understand all the sides of the issue, and until others in the group are satisfied that you understand.

(Shortform note: In Difficult Conversations, the authors argue that listening is often an active process: A good listener is someone who observes the speaker’s tone and body language as well as the words, and asks questions as necessary to make sure he understands.)

3. Collaborate: Covey’s last step is to create a list of alternatives that are better than the solutions that any individual could come up with herself.

(Shortform note: Effective collaboration doesn’t just produce a better solution, it also inspires people to work toward that shared vision. In The Leadership Challenge, the second principle of leadership is “Be Inspirational,” because engaging people’s emotions and imaginations ensures the best results. So, when collaborating, don’t just brainstorm—get people excited about the shared solution you come up with.)

Making Shared Responsibility Agreements

Once your group has a win-win solution in mind, a shared responsibility agreement will help establish priorities and keep group members working effectively toward the same goals. When creating the agreement, you and your group have to address five elements. Covey acknowledges that dealing with these elements thoughtfully and collaboratively takes time, but he says that this process will save you time in the long run because it will limit problems arising from miscommunication, as well as unclear expectations and objectives.

Covey’s five elements of shared responsibility agreements are:

  1. Desired Outcome: What result(s) do we want to achieve?
  2. Parameters: What values, legalities, and limits do we need to be aware of?
  3. Assets: What money, people, and technology do we have to work with?
  4. Criteria: How will we know when we’ve reached our goal? What criteria will we use to measure our success?
  5. Stakes: What will happen if we achieve our goals? What will happen if we don’t achieve our goals?

Go Beyond the Letter of the Agreement

The Harvard Business Review explains why all five parts of this shared agreement are necessary:

The article says that most common issues with shared agreements come from misunderstandings and “benign neglect.” In other words, people have different understandings of what they’ve agreed to, and they don’t realize that until it’s too late. That’s why it’s crucial to make sure that everybody’s clear on the spirit of the agreement, not just the terms of it.

The Final Word: Listen to Your Conscience

Covey ends by saying that learning to listen to your conscience—and act on its guidance—is the single best thing you can do to manage your time well, live a higher-quality life, and find lasting peace. He asserts that one of the most powerful questions you can ask your conscience is, “What can I do to make a difference?” The answer to this one question may dramatically alter how you invest your time.

(Shortform note: If “making a difference” seems like a hopeless endeavor, consider what Jack Canfield has to say in The Success Principles: Even small improvements can have enormous impacts over time. For example, just by swapping your sugary Starbucks drink for a cup of coffee made at home, you could save yourself hundreds of dollars and thousands of calories over the course of a year. Now apply that same principle to the world around you. What small change, sustained for a long time, would have a large impact? What can you do right now to start making that change?)

Shortform Introduction

In First Things First, Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, presents a time management approach that focuses on priorities, or “first things.” This approach teaches you to use your time effectively, meaning you focus more on prioritizing what you’re spending your time on, rather than how much time you're spending on each task.

The foundation of Covey’s system is learning to recognize when something that seems pressing isn’t actually important for your long-term goals. By ignoring these urgent-but-insignificant tasks, you reclaim time and energy that you can put toward your true life goals.

About the Author

Stephen R. Covey was a world-renowned author, motivational speaker, teacher, and entrepreneur. Although best known for his breakout bestseller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey wrote a number of books about productivity, motivation, and effective leadership. He’s often lauded for his revolutionary approach to self-help, which focuses first on who you are instead of what you do.

Covey received a number of awards and recognitions throughout his life, including being named one of Time Magazine’s 25 most influential Americans in 1996.

Covey held an MBA degree from Harvard University and a doctorate in religious education from Brigham Young University.

Connect with Stephen R. Covey:

Covey passed away in 2012. His online presence is curated by Franklin Covey Co., the leadership and business organization he founded.

Connect with Franklin Covey Co.:

The Book’s Publication

Publisher: Free Press, which was later acquired by Simon and Schuster.

The Book’s Context

Historical Context

First Things First was originally published in 1994, and it was Covey’s second big hit after The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989).

First Things First came out just one year after the World Wide Web became publicly available (1993), and the book proved prescient about the ever-increasing workloads and obligations that we’d face as the world became more interconnected and information-driven.

Intellectual Context

First Things First expands on the third of Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which is to focus on important things over urgent or time-sensitive things.

As Covey explains in the first chapter, First Things First is a pushback against the myriad of time management methods that only focus on how to get as much done as possible. Instead, following in the footsteps of Professor Charles Manz, Covey pushes for a system of “personal leadership” where you maximize both your productivity and happiness by only doing those tasks that are truly important to you.

In short, Covey was rebutting the then-current trend of time management by arguing that what you do is more important than how much you do.

The Book’s Impact

First Things First was a huge success upon release, eclipsing even the sales of 7 Habits. Simon and Schuster were quoted as saying that First Things First was the single best-selling time management book ever written.

The Book’s Strengths and Weaknesses

Critical Reception

First Things First received (and continues to receive) largely positive reviews. Fans describe the book as insightful and comprehensive, yet accessible. They also laud Covey for his focus on people and relationships, rather than just on tasks.

Critics of the book argue that Covey’s ideas are simplistic, and that First Things First is an unnecessary dragging-on of what he already explained in 7 Habits. Others, focusing on Covey’s advice for the workplace, argue that his ideas about employee empowerment and value-driven decisions are only practical for CEOs and high-level executives.

Commentary on the Book’s Approach

Covey’s focus on personal leadership—on finding and pursuing your own priorities—was, at the time, revolutionary. First Things First identified a major weakness in the current trends of time management: Namely, that most books of the time saw productivity as an end in itself. In other words, Covey firmly and effectively rejected the idea that just doing more is the key to success and happiness, and instead pushed for a person-focused approach that ensures you’re working toward the right goals.

However, because Covey was trying to break new ground in several areas with First Things First, his messages and the connections between them aren’t always clear. He begins by talking about past theories of time management and his proposal for a new theory, then shifts to talking about finding meaning in your life, then shifts again to discussing synergy and empowerment in the workplace. The result is a book that’s part leadership guide, part self-help book, and part philosophical text.

Commentary on the Book’s Organization

Covey divides his book into four sections:

  1. Why you should be concerned with what you do, instead of how much you do
  2. How to find what’s important to you and focus your energy on it
  3. Understanding how your goals tie into each other and into other people’s goals
  4. How his time management system leads to outer success and inner peace

The book’s organization is clear and builds on itself logically. The first section explains what we’re doing and the reasoning behind it, then the second section explains how to do it.

The third section may seem out of place at first glance, but understanding how you can pursue multiple goals at once is key to Covey’s system. It’s equally important that you understand how your goals can help other people with theirs, because the reverse is also true: People pursuing their own goals can help you achieve yours.

Finally, the last section explains the point of it all—Covey promises that following this system will lead you to a happy and fulfilling life.

Our Approach in This Guide

Our commentary provides context for Covey’s ideas by linking to other popular self-help and time management books like The 4-Hour Workweek and Ego Is the Enemy. We also provide insight into the history and thought processes behind Covey’s system with philosophical and spiritual ideas from books such as Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, or Robin Sharma’s parable The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari.

We’ve also consolidated the content in First Things First. Covey tends to repeat his ideas throughout the book in order to reinforce and build upon them; for brevity’s sake, we’ve removed most of that repetition. Finally, since the fourth section of Covey’s book is quite short and mainly serves as a conclusion wrapping up his ideas, we’ve relabeled it as such.

Part 1.1: Be Effective, Not Efficient

First Things First expands on the third of Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which is to focus on important things over urgent or time-sensitive tasks. As Covey explains in the first chapter, First Things First is a pushback against the myriad time management methods that only focus on how to get as much done as possible.

Covey begins by saying that many time management systems are about how to accomplish your goals as quickly as possible. For example, he points out how many books urge you to create lists of tasks, and then start checking things off those lists. However, he says this isn’t an effective approach to time management—it may leave you feeling like you never have enough time for the really important things like spending time with your loved ones or taking care of yourself.

Covey argues that, rather than focusing on how much time we spend on each task, we should focus on which tasks we’re working on. Covey believes that the key to effective time management is deciding which tasks are the most important (rather than the most pressing), and then working on those for however long it takes to complete them—in other words, putting the first things first.

(Shortform note: In The 4-Hour Workweek, entrepreneur Tim Ferriss tackles the idea of effectiveness versus efficiency in a business context, rather than a personal context. Ferriss adds that, although focusing on effectiveness is the best way to accomplish goals, companies typically focus on efficiency (how much work you get done) because it’s easier to measure. Unfortunately, that may leave management with an unclear picture of how well the company is doing—finishing a large number of unimportant tasks makes the company look very productive, but doesn’t move it any closer to its goals.)

The Past Eras of Time Management

Covey points out that, as culture has changed and life has gotten more hectic for everyone, there’s been an explosion of time management tools and literature using different methods to promote efficiency. He breaks down these tools into three “eras” of time management to reflect evolving theories and techniques, and he says that each era has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Efficiency Is Limited, Work Is Not

Oliver Burkeman, author of multiple books on balancing time management and happiness, wrote in 2016 that “time management is ruining our lives.” Burkeman argues that in the Information Age, work has become endless—that when you’re working with computers and data, there’s no point where you can look at a concrete, finished product and declare it done. As a result, we keep cramming more and more tasks into our days (increasing efficiency) in an effort to finish our unfinishable work, which leads to anxiety and burnout.

Burkeman describes what happens when you focus only on efficiency, rather than effectiveness. His solution—and Covey’s, as we’ll discuss—is to choose a few things to devote your time to, and leave the rest of the infinite pile of work alone.

The First Era: Reminders

The first era of time management is simply about reminding yourself of upcoming tasks. Writing to-do lists, leaving yourself notes, and setting alarms on your phone are examples of tools from this era of time management.

Covey says this era is good for individual tasks and short-term planning, but its weakness is that it doesn’t help you prioritize; it focuses on accomplishing the greatest number of tasks, rather than the most important tasks.

(Shortform note: In Getting Things Done, management consultant David Allen also talks about “outdated” time management techniques like calendars and to-do lists. Allen believes that such methods were effective in the past, when more people’s jobs tended to consist of concrete tasks (manufacturing products, for example, instead of programming websites), and their work hours ended at a set time. However, Allen does believe that calendars and lists still have their place. He suggests using them for tasks that must be done on a particular day or at a particular time—for example, a doctor’s appointment, which you must either go to when it’s scheduled or not go to at all.)

The Second Era: Long-Term Planning

This second category is similar to the first, but it goes a step further. Covey explains that this era uses calendars and agendas that allow you to prioritize your tasks and plan much further ahead than simple notes or alarms. For example, you could fill out a monthly or yearly planner with your goals, deadlines, and necessary steps to reach them.

Covey says this era’s main weakness is its inflexibility—something urgent or unexpected could disrupt your whole plan. You also run the risk of viewing interpersonal relationships and self-care as interruptions or distractions from your schedule of concrete tasks, instead of important and worthwhile uses of your time.

Another Approach: Keep Your Options Open

Covey points out that the main weakness of long-term planning is that it can’t account for unforeseen events. As we’ll see, his solution is to develop firm principles and goals to guide your moment-to-moment decisions, rather than relying on preset plans.

In Antifragile, author and mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb recommends a different approach. He agrees with Covey that planning for the future is impossible—there are simply too many unknown variables—but Taleb’s solution is to always give yourself as many different options as possible.

For example, even if you currently have a stable and enjoyable job, you might keep looking for work. That way, if your company starts downsizing and you’ve found something better, you’ll have the option to take it—if not, you don’t lose anything by staying in your current job.

The Third Era: Prioritizing and Goal-Setting

Covey writes that the third era of time management requires you to have some sense of your big-picture objectives and values so that you can set short-, medium-, and long-term goals for yourself. Much like the second era, this category relies heavily on planning and scheduling your tasks far in advance using tools like calendars and daily planners.

Covey acknowledges that the third era is a step in the right direction because it recognizes that your goals should be tied to your values. However, it’s fatally flawed because it’s rooted in incomplete or incorrect ideas: Namely, third-era time management focuses on controlling every aspect of your life (which is impossible) and doing more with your time (which is the same as the previous eras).

In essence, Covey argues that all three existing types of time management rely on narrow management techniques, rather than all-encompassing leadership techniques.

The difference between management and leadership, according to Covey, is that management is all about finding the best way to work within the current system, while leadership is about fixing the system itself. In other words, whereas management looks for the best way to accomplish pre-set goals, leadership finds the right goals to pursue.

Therefore, Covey proposes a fourth era: one that shifts focus from simple time management to true personal leadership.

Ask “Why” Instead of “How”

To look at this issue another way, you could say that management is about what you do, and leadership is about why you do it.

Simon Sinek, who writes and speaks about business and leadership, explores the question of “why” in Start With Why. According to Sinek, getting mired in questions of what you do and how you do it can cause you to lose sight of your principles and your goals. As a result, you’ll feel less motivated and accomplish less—and other people will think you’re shallow or self-centered.

By focusing instead on the reasons behind what you do, Sinek says you’ll be sure to make moment-to-moment decisions that are true to yourself and your personal objectives. In other words, stay focused on your principles and the rest will come naturally.

Although Start With Why is about how to run a company or organization, the same principles apply to personal leadership.

The Fourth Era: Personal Leadership

Covey believes that a fulfilling life isn’t about control or efficiency, but instead about determining the best uses of your time. You must first determine your priorities, or your “first things.” That’s why Covey’s fourth era is about making plans and goals based on your priorities, then using skills from the first, second, and third eras to achieve those goals.

The rest of First Things First lays out Covey’s ideas and techniques for this proposed fourth era of time management.

Background Info: Self-leadership

Business leadership professor Charles Manz first coined the idea of personal leadership (or, to use his term, self-leadership) in the early 1980s. According to Manz, there are two key aspects of self-leadership:

Covey’s proposed fourth era of time management is concerned with the first aspect: He wants you to learn what motivates you so that you can guide yourself toward relevant tasks.

Exercise: Understand Your Management Tools

Use these questions to determine which “generation” of management tools you currently use and which paradigms may be holding you back from living an effective life, rather than an efficient one. After you’ve identified the issues, later exercises will help you find solutions.

Part 1.2: Understand Covey’s Time Management Model

Covey says that two factors should determine how you spend your time:

  1. How significant each task is
  2. How pressing each task is—in other words, how soon you need to address it

Covey’s model of time management emphasizes only doing significant tasks: activities that are in line with your values and get you closer to your goals. Insignificant tasks, no matter how pressing they might be, aren’t worth your time.

This section will teach you how to recognize which tasks are significant, and how a simple model can help you determine the best use of your time.

(Shortform note: In The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss discusses pressing-yet-insignificant tasks like phone calls and unnecessary meetings. He calls them “interruptions” because they crop up unexpectedly and disrupt your flow. Ferriss adds that people are often reluctant or afraid to avoid these interruptions because they don’t have a good sense of what’s actually important. They worry that they’ll miss something crucial if they ignore a phone call, or that skipping a meeting or a get-together will create problems for them. However, it’s well-worth skipping such things if you can use that time for something more important—for example, ignoring a ringing phone because you’re playing with your children.)

Significance vs. Pressure

Covey plugs these two factors into a simple grid that allows us to categorize our tasks. This grid lets us quickly see what we should spend our time and energy on.

firstthingsfirst_graph.png

Background Info: The Eisenhower Matrix

Covey’s grid is closely based on the famous Eisenhower Matrix, developed by US president Dwight Eisenhower. The Eisenhower Matrix also suggests methods for dealing with the tasks in each zone:

Zone 1: Significant and Pressing

Zone 1 contains emergencies and problems that require your immediate attention. For example, a serious injury or a clogged toilet in your home are both situations that need to be addressed as soon as possible.

Zone 1 tasks are always the first things you should handle. However, Covey urges you to prevent tasks from reaching this quadrant; whenever possible, tackle significant tasks before they become pressing. This is crucial because putting things off leaves you with an ever-growing list of urgent tasks—you could eventually find yourself stuck in a cycle of constantly dealing with emergencies because you no longer have the time for preventative measures.

Why Do We End Up in Zone 1?

We’re often tempted to ignore looming crises because they’re inconvenient or painful to deal with—in other words, we resort to denial. Unfortunately, denying that a problem exists and refusing to prepare will only make it worse.

Poor Charlie’s Almanac, a collection of speeches and writings by billionaire business executive Charlie Munger, has some theories about why we’re so prone to denial, and how to break out of it. Munger speculates that denial must have had some survival benefit for our ancestors. Perhaps denial was necessary to keep functioning in stressful or frightening situations. He also notes that denial is the first stage of grief, suggesting that it is indeed a short-term coping mechanism for emotional pain.

Finally, Munger says that the way to escape denial is to repeatedly face the truth. Whatever painful truth you’re avoiding, say it to yourself over and over until you accept it as fact. Then you’ll be better able to handle the problem, hopefully before it becomes an emergency.

Zone 2: Significant, but Not Pressing

Zone 2 is where you do prevention, maintenance, long-term planning, relationship building, and personal leadership activities like evaluating your values. Zone 2 activities aren’t urgent, so you could easily put them off; however, every task you handle in Zone 2 is a task that never crosses into Zone 1 (significant and pressing).

Covey makes a point of saying that keeping ourselves healthy (both physically and emotionally) belongs on the list of important tasks, so that they don’t become urgent tasks. For example, eating a healthy diet is important, but not urgent—until you’re suffering from diabetes or another serious condition because you never made the time to take care of yourself.

According to Covey, there are six main types of Zone 2 activities:

  1. Strengthening relationships—For example, spending time with your children or attending a friend’s birthday party
  2. Planning, organizing, and preparing for the future (near or distant)—For example, creating a schedule for the coming week or putting together an emergency kit
  3. Practicing self-care—For example, preparing healthy meals or pursue a hobby you enjoy
  4. Capitalizing on new opportunities—For example, researching investment opportunities or expanding your professional network
  5. Engaging in personal development activities—For example, learning a new language or going to the gym
  6. Empowering yourself and others—For example, investing in your entrepreneurial dream or mentoring someone

(Shortform note: In The Leadership Challenge, James Kouzes and Barry Posner note that leadership—including self-leadership—is an ongoing process. It’s not about making occasional, dramatic gestures or big projects; instead, it’s about the little tasks you do each day that keep things running smoothly and consistently bring you closer to your goals. That’s the essence of Covey’s list of Zone 2 activities: An ongoing stream of small-but-important tasks that enable you to stay productive, fulfilled, and happy.)

Zone 3: Pressing, but Not Significant

Covey’s Zone 3 is a dangerous time-sink: The urgency of these activities can make them seem significant, but they don’t actually align with your values or contribute to achieving your goals. Oftentimes these tasks are important to other people, so you feel pressured into doing them to meet others’ priorities and expectations. The key to staying out of Zone 3 is simply recognizing when a task isn’t significant and refusing to do it.

According to Covey, Zone 3 activities might include answering emails, attending parties or events that you don’t really want to go to, or helping a coworker with something that’s not your responsibility.

Practice Rejection

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Manson says that we live in a society that tells us we should say “yes” to everything—that we should value everything and everyone. However, he argues, valuing everything is effectively the same as valuing nothing; in either case, we have nothing to guide our decision-making.

Therefore, Manson’s solution is to practice rejection: saying “no” to things that don’t align with our values and don’t get us closer to our goals. According to Manson, rejection is a skill that everyone should learn. Like any new skill, it will feel uncomfortable and difficult at first, but with practice you’ll find it easier to reject unimportant matters and focus your energy where it’s most needed. Zone 3 activities are ideal for practicing rejection.

Zone 4: Neither Significant Nor Pressing

Finally, Covey says that tasks in Zone 4 are complete wastes of your time and energy, like watching mindless movies in an addictive way, spreading rumors and gossip, or abusing alcohol and other drugs. These activities add no value to your life; even recreational activities don’t belong here, because recreation is a restorative and valuable Zone 2 (significant but not pressing) activity.

Covey says that you might end up doing Zone 4 tasks out of confusion about what’s truly important, or as a mental escape. However, such tasks don’t substantially improve your circumstances nor your mental state.

How to Distinguish Between Zone 2 and Zone 4

It’s sometimes hard to tell whether something is an important Zone 2 task, or an insignificant Zone 4 task, especially when it comes to recreation. However, we can use scientific evidence to try to determine which activities are worthwhile and which are not.

For example, a great deal of evidence suggests that social media use may actually be harmful to mental health, especially in young people—excessive scrolling and refreshing may cause (or worsen) feelings of isolation and anxiety. Therefore, using social media for more than just staying connected to your friends and family is a Zone 4 activity—it doesn’t improve your life or get you closer to your goals.

However, activities like listening to music, reading, or playing (some) video games do have significant benefits and should go in Zone 2 instead.

Exactly which things go into Zone 2 instead of Zone 4 is a personal decision, but the key is to be aware of which tasks actually bring you joy or boost your skills, and which tasks just leave you feeling drained and frustrated.

Applying the Zones to Real Life

Now that you understand Covey’s significance-pressure grid, the next step is understanding how to apply it to your own life.

1. Further prioritize within Zone 1: Facing multiple Zone 1 (significant and pressing) tasks that are all pressing and significant can be overwhelming. That overwhelm could push you back toward an earlier-era model of trying to get more things done, rather than get the right things done.

Using the grid at the beginning of this section, you can plot your activities more specifically than just breaking them into zones: The farther to the right a task is on the grid, the more pressing it is. The farther up a task is, the more significant it is. Filling in the grid this way will allow you to easily see which tasks you should prioritize within each zone.

(Shortform note: In Extreme Ownership, retired Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin offer useful tips for personal leadership, especially in stressful and high-pressure situations. On the subject of prioritizing, Willink and Babin suggest asking yourself whether any of the tasks on your list, if not handled, would make the other tasks irrelevant. For example, if you have both a personal health crisis and a crisis at work, then the health crisis should be the first thing you deal with—after all, your career won’t matter if you’re too sick to work.)

2. Determine why you’re in Zone 1: Covey says it’s inevitable that you’ll sometimes end up stuck dealing with significant and pressing tasks in Zone 1; however, it’s always important to understand why you’re there. Except in genuine emergencies, it’s often because you focus too much on pressing tasks instead of prioritizing significant ones—remember, a lot of this zone may consist of tasks that you didn’t handle while they were in Zone 2 (significant, not pressing).

Prepare for Emergencies

As Covey says, emergencies do happen in spite of our best efforts. Whether it’s a health crisis, a natural disaster, or an unexpected expense, there are many things in life that we simply can’t control. Therefore, it’s important to take steps beforehand to make sure that you’re ready for sudden Zone 1 events:

All of these preparations are important Zone 2 activities.

3. Create time for Zone 2: This can be difficult, especially if you’re stuck in a cycle of urgency. Covey’s advice is to make time by moving away from Zone 3 (pressing but not significant); recognize when urgent tasks are not important, and stop wasting your time on them. By doing so, you’ll be able to reinvest that time and energy into Zone 2 (significant but not pressing).

(Shortform note: Recall that a key part of Covey’s fourth era of time management is using the skills from previous eras to achieve your goals. Time management and efficiency techniques will help you make time for your important Zone 2 activities; the key is to make sure that you’re not using those techniques for unimportant tasks in Zone 3 or Zone 4 (neither significant nor pressing).)

4. Focus on Zone 2, especially if you work in a Zone 1 environment: Some people have jobs that inherently involve a lot of time in Zone 1, including firefighters, doctors, police officers, and news reporters. Covey says that these are the people who need Zone 2 the most—since they’re already facing a lot of issues that are both significant and pressing, they need to handle as much as possible before it becomes pressing.

(Shortform note: Covey’s advice here is reminiscent of a Zen proverb that says you should meditate for 20 minutes every day, unless you don’t have the time—in which case you should meditate for an hour every day. Just like Covey’s insistence that we focus on Zone 2 activities when we’re already swamped with Zone 1 activities, the point of the proverb is that the people who are constantly overworked and stressed are the ones who need meditation the most. In both cases, the point is to invest some time now—especially if you don’t think you can afford to—so that you can tackle problems more effectively and easily going forward.)

Covey says that once you recognize how you’re spending your time within the four quadrants, you can begin to shift your approach to prioritize truly important tasks. If you can get out of Zones 3 (pressing but not significant) and 4 (neither significant nor pressing), and dedicate your time entirely to Zones 1 and 2, you’ll take more control of your life and time.

Exercise: Identify Your Primary Zones

Use these questions to identify where you spend the most time: Zone 1 (significant and pressing), Zone 2 (significant but not pressing), Zone 3 (pressing but not significant), or Zone 4 (neither significant nor pressing).

Part 1.3: Adopt a Significance-Based Approach

We’ve discussed why it’s critical to place significance over pressure and use your time in a way that aligns with your goals and values. Furthermore, people who take a significance-based approach to life (as opposed to a pressure-based approach) tend to feel more confident, peaceful, and fulfilled, because they feel like they’re using their time in a meaningful way. So, how do you do that?

According to Covey, there are three critical elements to a significance-based approach to life. This section is devoted to explaining these three elements and teaching you how to incorporate them into your life.

The three elements of a significance-based approach are:

  1. Meet your essential needs.
  2. Follow universal principles.
  3. Use your unique human gifts.

What’s Significant to You?

Determining what’s significant and meaningful to you is a personal process, but one way to think about it is to reflect on what would make you feel successful. Psychology Today interviewed four business executives from various industries and countries around the world. One question was how they defined success for themselves.

Two of the four executives answered that they needed to have specific goals and be actively working to accomplish those goals in order to consider themselves successful. Notably, neither of their goals had anything to do with wealth or power: One wanted to create jobs in Myanmar, while the other wanted to provide education and security to people who needed it.

Another executive answered that, to her, success meant freedom—the ability to do what she wanted when she wanted, and to work on whatever project held her attention at the moment. The last person answered that her satisfaction came from the process of working and the progress she saw herself making, rather than from any specific goal.

The common thread among all four executives is that they know what success means to them, and they feel satisfied when they work toward it. Whether it’s a concrete goal like creating jobs, or a more nebulous value like freedom, they all know what brings them fulfillment.

Element #1: Fulfill Your Four Essential Needs

Covey says we each have four essential needs:

  1. Survival: This refers to your physical needs like food, housing, and medicine—everything you need to stay alive and healthy.
  2. Connection: Humans are social creatures; we have a deep-seated need to connect with each other. To that end, we need strong relationships with friends, family, and romantic partners.
  3. Learning: This doesn’t just mean formal education, but rather the lifelong pursuit of new knowledge and experiences to enrich your mind.
  4. Giving Back: People want to live purposeful lives that somehow improve the world. This also connects with the desire to be remembered—to leave a legacy.

Why Are These Essential Needs?

The phrase “essential needs” should be taken literally: These are all things that are hardwired into our biology because they helped our ancestors to survive. In his book The Selfish Gene, scientist Richard Dawkins explains in much greater detail how these needs (and other traits) are passed down through generations.

Covey also believes that the four essential needs are interrelated—if you’re not meeting one of them, that can hinder your ability to meet the others. For example, if you’re struggling with your survival needs, you probably don’t have the time or resources to give back to your community.

However, that interconnection also means that putting more energy into one need helps fulfill the other areas. For example, if you learn a new skill or trade, that may help you to earn more money—which, in turn, will allow you to meet your survival needs.

Maslow’s Pyramid vs. Covey’s Web

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, one of the best-known models of human psychology, also describes essential human needs. Maslow’s model consists of five levels, some of which overlap with Covey’s four essential needs:

Maslow’s hierarchy is traditionally shown as a pyramid, with physical needs at the bottom and self-fulfillment needs at the top—the idea is that each level is necessary to support the ones above it. For example, according to Maslow, a person struggling to meet his survival needs won’t be concerned with social needs.

By contrast, Covey takes a different approach with his suggestion that human needs are an interconnected web, and that meeting any of them can help you to fulfill the others. For example, a loving family or a strong community will help make sure that your physical and safety needs are met; they might donate money and food, or give you a place to stay until you can support yourself again.

Element #2: Understand Universal Principles

Covey’s second step toward shifting to a significance-based approach is understanding “universal principles.”

According to Covey, a number of fundamental principles govern the world, and you can use them to guide your actions. These core principles are valued across all cultures, generations, and schools of thought.

(Shortform note: Although Covey says that these are universal values, it’s worth noting that some cultures value them more highly than others. For example, many Western cultures tend to emphasize individualism over cooperation.)

While you can’t control the outcomes of your actions, Covey says, you can be sure that universal principles will affect those outcomes. Therefore, if you also live according to universal principles, the outcomes will be in line with your intentions—even if they’re not exactly what you had in mind.

Some of Covey’s “universal principles” are:

Make Sure Your Principles Are Positive

In his popular self-help book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, author Mark Manson offers some guidelines for determining good values (or principles) as opposed to bad ones.

Manson says that all positive values share three qualities:

All of Covey’s “universal principles” meet these three criteria, and you can use Manson’s criteria as a guide to finding values that speak to you.

Use Principles to Build Practices

To better understand Covey’s universal principles, it’s important to realize that principles aren’t the same thing as practices.

Covey defines practices as specific skills and actions. They can help you achieve short-term results in certain situations, but they won’t be universally applicable. Imagine if you learned how to play Poker (a practice), then tried to apply the same rules to Blackjack: it just wouldn’t work.

However, if you focus on developing principles, you’ll have a strong foundation on which to build new practices whenever you need to. Continuing with the Blackjack example, someone who approaches a table with principles of truthfulness (“I don’t know how to play this game”), discipline (“I am willing to learn how to play”), and perseverance (“I’ll lose at first, but I won’t give up”) will quickly develop a new practice: playing Blackjack.

How to Build Principles

In his self-help classic How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie notes that it’s not easy to develop new principles. He offers a few tips to help the process:

There Are No Quick Fixes

Everybody wants a quick fix for their problems. However, Covey says that won’t work. If you want to make substantial, lasting changes in your life, you first need to change your principles because—as we discussed before—your principles guide your practices. Therefore, if your practices aren’t getting you the results you want, the only solution is to change your principles.

Covey suggests that you think about how universal principles pertain to each of your four essential needs:

Essential Need Universal Principle(s) Reasoning
Survival
  • Discipline
  • Self-control
This essential need encompasses everything you need to stay physically healthy, such as exercise, a good diet, and a steady income.

Discipline and self-control are necessary to avoid the quick-fix pleasures of junk food, laziness, or get-rich-quick schemes.

Connection
  • Perseverance
  • Faithfulness
Strong, healthy relationships (whether romantic or platonic) take time and effort to build and maintain. If you aren’t faithful and loyal to others, those relationships will quickly fall apart.

Quick-fix relationships, like drinking buddies or purely sexual conquests, won’t bring you long-term satisfaction.

Learning
  • Discipline
  • Perseverance
  • Commitment (Shortform note: Covey doesn't directly associate a principle with this need, but we can infer some appropriate principles from his description of it.)
Learning doesn’t end when you graduate from school; enriching and expanding your mind is a lifelong process.

The quick-fix view of education as just a way to get a good job may leave you feeling stuck and unfulfilled in a job that doesn’t stimulate your mind.

Giving back
  • Cooperation
  • Charity
Modern society tends to promote self-improvement and personal goals as quick-fix methods for happiness and satisfaction.

While those are valuable practices, true fulfillment comes from having a purpose that’s greater than yourself—helping other people and making the world a little better.

Element #3: Understand the Four Human Gifts

Covey’s third step for changing to a significance-based approach is understanding the four unique human gifts:

  1. Self-awareness is your ability to think about your thoughts and actions. This allows you to recognize that you have paradigms, question them, and evaluate how they’re affecting your behavior.
  2. Morality is your internal compass. Your morality helps you recognize when your actions don’t align with your principles.
  3. Creativity is your capacity to imagine new possibilities. This is the power to envision the future you want or come up with new solutions to problems.
  4. Willpower is your ability to choose your actions. Although habits, environment, and conditioning can strongly influence how you react to a situation, your will gives you the power to choose a different response.

Tara Brach’s “Essential Pause”

One way of bringing your unique human gifts to bear is through what Tara Brach describes in Radical Acceptance as the essential pause. Instead of immediately reacting to a situation, Brach tells us to take a moment to consider what’s happening, how it’s impacting us in that moment, and what we should do about it.

In other words, in that moment of pause, you can ask yourself:

And finally, you would use your willpower to enact the response you’ve chosen.

Like the four essential needs, Covey’s four human gifts are interrelated, and neglecting one harms the others. For example, you might have the self-awareness to recognize a change you want to make in your life, but you’ll also need the creativity to figure out how to make that change and the will to implement it. Conversely, when you effectively develop and nourish all of your human gifts, they work together to help you achieve a higher quality of life. These four unique gifts are the core of Covey’s fourth era of time management: personal leadership.

(Shortform note: President Eisenhower is famously quoted as saying that leadership means getting someone to do what you want, because he wants to do it. It means that a true leader doesn’t just tell others what to do—he or she inspires those people so that they choose to do it. That quote holds true for self-leadership as well: It’s not just about telling yourself what to do and when, it’s about inspiring yourself to want to make changes and improvements to your life. Covey says that engaging your four human gifts will help you feel fulfilled and motivated to make those changes.)

Exercise: Identify Your Growth Opportunities

Examine your unique gifts and identify which ones could use your attention.

Part 2.1: Start Zone 2 Scheduling

Now that you understand the significance-based approach, let’s put it into practice with Covey’s Zone 2 scheduling process, which aims to improve your quality of life by prioritizing your time based on principles, needs, and gifts.

Each section in Part 2 explores one step of Covey’s Zone 2 organizing process in detail. The first step we’ll explore is creating a personal mission statement that helps you determine what’s significant to you.

Do More by Doing Less

In The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, self-help author Robin Sharma suggests managing your time by doing less, rather than more. At its core, this advice is the same as Covey’s Zone 2 organizing process: Do what’s most important to you (effectiveness), instead of trying to accomplish the most in the least time (efficiency).

However, Sharma suggests a different way of evaluating what’s important, by using the “80/20 Rule” (sometimes called the Pareto Principle), a rule-of-thumb that 80% of outcomes stem from just 20% of what you do. Therefore, the key to getting the most value out of your time is to identify which parts of your life fall into that 20%, and to devote most of your time to those.

Create Your Personal Mission Statement

Covey believes that your idea of the future is your most powerful tool when it comes to building the life you want. Your human gift of creativity allows you to create a vision of the future, and that vision has an incredible influence on your behaviors, affecting the choices you make each day and how you manage your time.

Covey says if you have a vision that’s based on your principles, addresses your essential needs, uses your human gifts, and encompasses all the roles and aspects of your life, it sparks a powerful passion inside you to create the life you envision in spite of all obstacles—in other words, turning your vision into reality will become your mission.

Use Goals to Find Your Purpose

Much like Covey, Robin Sharma believes that a clear purpose in life will guide you to the right decisions in uncertain situations—all you have to do is determine which course of action gets you closer to your purpose. In The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, _Sharma says that purpose is like a lighthouse guiding you through dark and dangerous waters.

However, while Covey suggests finding your purpose by looking at what you’re already doing with your life (as we’ll discuss), Sharma suggests considering what you want to do in various areas of your life. Sharma urges you to take a few minutes right now to write down some clear and specific goals related to your career, family, physical health, or wherever you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve. Sharma also urges you not to second-guess yourself while you’re making this list—remember, you can always update it later.

Once you have some specific goals written down, you may be able to see a larger purpose that they’re leading you toward. For example, perhaps the reason you want to stay physically healthy is so you can be present in your childrens’ lives for longer, because your purpose is to be a good parent.

Discover Your Roles

Everyone plays a number of roles in life. For example, you might be a parent, a child, an employee, a supervisor or manager, a churchgoer, or a community leader. The first step in writing your personal mission statement is to identify each of your roles in life; Covey suggests focusing on no more than seven roles.

Next to each role, write down what you hope to contribute to the world through that role, and how you’d like others to think of you as a result of it. These roles and their associated goals should collectively paint a picture of your ideal life. Consider how you feel as you look at this vision of what your life could amount to—are you satisfied with it?

Counterpoint: Maybe It’s Not About You

For many people, envisioning and then creating the life that they want for themselves is the most powerful motivation imaginable. However, some people have trouble getting motivated while thinking only of their own benefit—something that Covey addresses in a roundabout way when he notes that our roles only exist in terms of other people (parent, teacher, employee, and so on). Therefore, if you don’t find improving your own life to be a compelling motivation, think of your mission statement as a way to help the people you interact with in your various roles.

In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius reinforces this view when he suggests taking a step back and seeing your life in the context of the universe: You are one small spark of awareness in an infinite universe, and you only exist for a tiny fraction of eternity. Aurelius’s insistence that each of us (including himself) is insignificant isn’t meant to be discouraging or degrading; rather, he wants to encourage us to see things in perspective. If our own lives are insignificant, then our duties—the things we’re meant to do with our lives—must be to serve others and improve the world in some way that only we can.

According to Covey, the roles we play are key to finding fulfillment, but only if we approach them in a balanced way. Most people’s biggest source of dissatisfaction and unhappiness in life is the imbalance they feel between their different roles and responsibilities. For example, many people feel that their careers are so demanding that they don’t have time or energy to devote to their families and friends. This feeling of being constantly pulled in different directions stems from the idea that your roles are either/or decisions—for example, that you could devote your next hour to your job or to your community, but not both.

However, Covey asserts that separation of roles is an illusion: The person who goes to work and brainstorms in meetings is the same person who cooks dinner at home and helps the kids with homework. All of your roles are part of you as a whole; therefore, who you are in each role impacts who you are in all your other roles.

For instance, if you’re struggling at work because you’re constantly tired, then devoting time to your role as an individual—a person who needs time to rest and to enjoy life—might make you a faster and more efficient worker.

Covey’s description of your roles all working together is similar to Robin Sharma’s description of discipline in The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. Sharma believes that discipline is like many thin wires (practices) all wrapped around each other. Individually, each wire is weak and easily broken, but together they form an extremely strong cable.

When Covey discusses the relationships among your various roles, or how fulfilling one need can help you to fulfill others, picture yourself weaving that cable of wires; any Zone 2 (significant but not pressing) practice in one role also supports and strengthens your other roles.

Set Expectations for Each Role

Remember that your roles are really just labels for how you relate to other people. Each role impacts the people around you, just as those people’s roles impact you.

Therefore, another way to maintain balance and organization among your roles is to clearly define each of your roles and the responsibilities you have within them. Many people find it helpful to do this in the form of a mission statement or collective agreement that’s separate from their general personal mission statement.

As you define each role, clarify the expectations that the people involved have for each other. For example, in your role as a spouse, talk with your partner about each of your expectations of each other in your marriage. In your role as an employee, talk to your boss about your position in the company: what the company needs from you, and vice versa.

In Part 3, we’ll take a closer look at how to work with others to mutually fulfill your roles.

Examine Your Relationships

Another word for “role” is “relationship”; Covey is really telling us to think about our relationships with other people, and what we hope to get out of them. It may be helpful to examine not only your present relationships (as Covey suggests) but also your past ones, as suggested in the lifestyle guide Minimalism.

In Minimalism, former corporate managers Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus (who call themselves The Minimalists) talk about how they gave up most of their wealth and possessions to focus on what really matters, including their relationships. They found that every past relationship, whether positive or negative, contained important lessons that they could use to improve their present and future relationships.

For example, if you once had a romantic partner who used you as an emotional crutch and never gave support to you when you needed it, that’s a red flag that you now know to watch out for as you define your roles and expectations.

Organize Information by Roles

Covey says that you can further nurture balance by organizing notes and information according to your roles. He suggests creating separate sections in your planner or organizer for each role. Then, when you have information or notes pertaining to a specific role, file it in that section.

You can also file phone numbers and addresses according to each role—for anything from friends (personal role), to colleagues (work role), to carpet cleaning services (home management role).

This style of organization plays to your natural mental associations and makes it easier to organize and find information. This strategy also reinforces balance and a Zone 2 emphasis on importance because you can easily see what’s important within each role, rather than throwing everything into the same pile where anything pressing will naturally grab your attention.

Covey also suggests setting up a filing drawer or computer folders with the same roles for longer-term planning; when you no longer need to keep something readily accessible in your planner, transfer it over to this filing system. That way, all of your information will still be organized by role, but you won’t get overwhelmed by having too many things in your weekly planner.

(Shortform note: Dividing information by role naturally plays into what learning expert Barbara Oakley calls “information chunking.” Basically, your mind will naturally organize information into chunks of related knowledge, a bit like a computer defragmenting its hard drive. Later, when you try to recall something about that topic, instead of accessing one specific fact in your memory, you’ll access that entire chunk. Covey’s suggestion here is essentially the same process, only done externally instead of inside your mind: You’re compiling small pieces of information into larger chunks for quick and easy access.)

Balance Your Roles

It’s one thing to understand that your roles are interrelated, but it’s another to put that into practice in your time management approach. How do you combine your time when you need to create a presentation for work and also help your daughter with her science project?

To find balance among your roles in life, Covey urges you to stop thinking in terms of “either/or,” and start thinking in terms of “and.” Look for areas where your roles overlap, so that you can address multiple needs at once. For example, if you find a hobby that you and your kids both enjoy, you can fulfill your role as a parent and your role as an individual at the same time.

Finding those overlaps won’t always be possible—but, when it is, you can accomplish goals much more effectively.

(Shortform note: Covey isn’t talking about multitasking in this section. In fact, there’s no such thing—what people see as “multitasking” is actually rapidly switching between tasks, which makes you unfocused and less effective overall. Instead, Covey’s urging you to look for ways to meet multiple needs or fulfill multiple roles by focusing entirely on a single activity.)

Base Your Mission Statement on Your Roles

According to Covey, your roles and goals should be the basis for your personal mission statement. You’ll translate them into a principles-based mission that meets your four essential needs and makes use of your unique human gifts.

Covey says that personal mission statements are as unique as the people who write them. They can be pages long or just a few sentences; they can be expressed in words, music, or art.

However, for all of its uniqueness, Covey believes any effective mission statement has several characteristics:

  1. It reflects a deep understanding of yourself: your values, your unique abilities, and your vision of the future.
  2. It addresses all four human needs: survival, connection, learning, and giving back.
  3. It balances all the important roles in your life—personal, family, work, and community.
  4. It includes a purpose and methods of achieving that purpose that are based on universal principles.
  5. It inspires you.

Sinek’s Guidelines for a Mission Statement

In The Infinite Game, Simon Sinek offers his own set of guidelines for what defines an effective mission statement (or in Sinek’s words, a just cause).

According to Sinek, a mission statement should:

After coming up with a mission statement based on Covey’s advice, you may find it useful to check that statement against these more specific guidelines from Sinek.

Live Out Your Mission Statement

Covey says that crafting your personal mission statement is a critical first step, and the next step is to live that mission through your day-to-day activities.

In order to do that, you need to revisit your mission statement frequently to internalize your mission. Your personal mission statement must always be in your heart and mind, and you should use it as the foundation of your weekly Zone 2 organizing.

Covey also suggests setting aside a specific time each year to review your mission statement and update it, if needed.

Find Your Dominant Question

By crafting a mission statement and keeping it at the forefront of your mind, you’re priming your brain with the question, “How can I fulfill my mission?” That question will encourage you to subconsciously look for answers and to consciously make choices that bring you closer to your goals.

Limitless author Jim Kwik calls these thoughts dominant questions: difficult or complicated questions that prime your mind to look for answers or relevant information. For instance, if you’re in the market for a new car and suddenly notice car ads everywhere, Kwik would say it’s because your mind is looking for the answer to your current dominant question (“Which car should I get?”).

The Zone 2 Organizing Process Creates Balance

Your personal mission statement is the foundation of Covey’s Zone 2 organizing process, which is designed to nurture and balance your roles as you pursue your mission.

First, the practice of reviewing your mission statement before you begin your weekly planning keeps you connected with your vision, passion, and principles. Since your mission statement addresses all four of your human needs, reviewing it improves your ability to create inner balance.

Second, by reviewing your roles each week, you’re able to see them as the avenues through which you can achieve your mission. You’re reminded of each role’s physical, social, mental, and spiritual dimensions, and so you’re able to effectively balance and synergize them.

Why Is Balance Important?

Psychologist Jim Taylor writes about the harmful impacts of an imbalanced life, including stress, poor health, problems at work and at home, and overall reduced life satisfaction. Warning signs to watch out for include feelings of guilt (that you’re not devoting enough time to an area of your life, such as your family), feeling like you’re missing out on social activities, and losing touch with friends or loved ones.

Though Taylor talks specifically about work/life balance, the same principles apply to balancing all of the roles in your life.

Balance Is Large-Scale and Long-Term

Covey warns that, even with all the tools in First Things First, your roles won’t always be in perfect balance from week to week. Sometimes you’ll need a short-term imbalance in order to create long-term balance—this is normal, and often necessary in order to deal with the changing demands of life. For example, a student with final exams coming up will probably need to devote more time to her studies and less time to her friends and family for a while.

If you must create a short-term imbalance in your life, make sure it’s a conscious choice that serves your personal mission. Check in regularly with your conscience and your personal mission statement; make sure your actions are still in line with your long-term goals and that they promote long-term balance. Above all else, avoid the trap of falling back into Zone 3 (pressing but not significant) tasks and pressure-based decision making.

Balance vs. Counterbalance

Real estate entrepreneur Gary Keller’s book The One Thing rebukes a number of “myths” about life and work, one of which is the concept of a balanced life. Keller’s and Covey’s approaches for a balanced life are the same in practice, but their framings are opposite. While Covey emphasizes a balanced life, Keller argues that striving for balance prevents you from making any extraordinary commitments to anything—which, in turn, keeps you from achieving anything extraordinary.

Keller’s solution is to “counterbalance” by constantly making small adjustments to your focus and your commitments. For example, put in a lot of overtime one week, and make up for it by focusing on your family or yourself the next week. In other words, you’ll never be perfectly balanced; the key is to make sure that you constantly compensate for your imbalances.

Exercise: Prepare for Zone 2 Scheduling

Determine what you’ll need for your Zone 2 scheduling, and how you’ll approach it.

Part 2.2: Set Goals

Zone 2 scheduling won’t be effective if you don’t have specific goals to work towards. That’s why Covey believes that setting goals is a key part of effective self-improvement and time management methods. However, he warns that goals can be counterproductive if you don’t set and execute them judiciously. In this section, we’ll first explain the risks involved in goal-setting, then explore how to set helpful goals and work toward them effectively.

Covey says that there are two major ways in which goals can end up working against you:

  1. Your sense of integrity and your courage take a hit when you fail to achieve a goal.
  2. Sometimes, even when you do achieve your goal, the outcome is unexpectedly negative.

(Shortform note: Clinical psychologist Alisa Crossfield points out that goals can be powerful motivators, but they can also be sources of anxiety and stress. She writes that setting goals that are unrealistic or unsuitable for you, or setting too many goals at once can be harmful to your mental and emotional health. She warns that doing so can lead to unhealthy coping mechanisms like drug abuse and avoiding responsibilities.)

Falling Short of Your Goal Hurts Your Integrity

Covey defines personal integrity as the trust you have in yourself to do the things you say you’re going to do. When you successfully make and keep a commitment, you strengthen your sense of integrity, which makes you feel more confident and in control of your life.

However, when you fail to achieve a goal or keep a commitment, you suffer a painful blow to your confidence. Frequent failures deplete your trust in yourself and others’ trust in you, making it harder to have the confidence and courage to set and achieve goals in the future—which just continues the cycle of low personal integrity and low confidence.

Covey believes that strengthening your integrity is like strengthening your muscles: It takes time and consistent effort. That’s why it’s important to maintain your sense of integrity through setting reasonable goals, and putting in the work to reach them.

(Shortform note: While Covey argues that personal integrity improves your individual confidence, accomplishment, and satisfaction, research similarly shows that high levels of integrity within an organization increase employee confidence and company profits. Researchers surveyed roughly 6,500 Holiday Inn employees to figure out how much they trusted their managers—in other words, how much integrity they believed their managers had. The survey found that even a slight increase in managerial integrity predicted a huge increase in annual profits for that location, because employees performed better when they felt they could trust their bosses.)

The Reasons We Don’t Reach Our Goals

Covey says that there are two main reasons we fail to reach our goals:

1. The goal is unrealistic. Sometimes, in a rush of enthusiasm and motivation, we set goals that simply aren’t achievable. For example, if you’ve just started playing a sport, setting a goal to go professional is most likely setting yourself up for failure. Covey warns that each failure is a blow to your personal integrity.

Counterpoint: The 10X Rule

While many self-help authors, including Covey, urge us to set realistic goals so we can enjoy the satisfaction of meeting them, Grant Cardone’s book The 10X Rule suggests the exact opposite: Set extreme goals, then do whatever is necessary to meet those goals. The title comes from Cardone’s rule of setting a “realistic” goal, then multiplying that goal by 10.

Whereas Covey argues that we’ll be unhappy if we set goals that we can’t reach, Cardone says that only achieving part of a 10X goal is still greater success than fully achieving a mediocre goal. However, Cardone also talks about putting 10X more effort into his career goals than others—it’s up to you whether you can put so much energy into a single area and still maintain a balanced life.

2. Circumstances change. There are times when even reasonable goals stop serving your purposes. For example, professional athletes often develop severe or chronic injuries and have to retire. In such cases, they might feel like they’ve given up or betrayed themselves, causing a loss of personal integrity; however, it’s important to recognize when a particular goal isn’t helping you anymore, and to let go of it.

Adapting to Change Is a Zone 2 Task

The business parable Who Moved My Cheese? illustrates the necessity of adapting to change. The story is about four characters who live in a maze and look for cheese (which, in this story, is a stand-in for success or happiness). For many days they always find the cheese in a particular place—then, one day, it isn’t there.

Two of the characters immediately recognize that the situation has changed, and they go off in search of a new source of cheese. Covey would say that they’re handling an important Zone 2 task: finding a new food source.

The other two stay where the cheese is “supposed” to be, and become more and more frustrated and angry that it isn’t reappearing. Finally, one of the holdouts—driven by hunger and desperation—does what the others did in the first place and goes out searching for new cheese. Covey would say that this character waited until a Zone 2 task had crossed into Zone 1 (significant and pressing) before dealing with it.

Eventually, three characters who went searching end up at a new, even larger stockpile of cheese. However, the two who immediately accepted the new situation got there much sooner and suffered much less hunger along the way. It’s unclear whether the fourth character ever found it.

The takeaway is that adapting to change is an important Zone 2 task—best handled before it crosses into Zone 1 and you’re urgently scrambling to make the needed changes.

Reaching a Goal Doesn’t Always Bring the Results You Want

Covey also warns that, although failing to reach a goal can be a painful experience, sometimes achieving that goal can be painful in a different way. If the goals you set don’t nurture balance in your life, accomplishing them can come at the expense of sacrificing something more important.

Working hard to achieve a goal, then realizing that it caused more harm than good in your life, can cause you to become disillusioned and wary of the goal-setting process in general. That’s why it’s important to set your goals carefully, making sure that they’re in line with your mission and your roles.

An Example of Success Without Balance

Robin Sharma’s The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari offers a perfect (albeit fictional) example of someone whose goals didn’t promote a balanced life.

Julian Mantle was, by any common measure, a successful lawyer: He was rich, had every material possession he could dream of, and his skill in the courtroom was world-renowned. However, because his goals were all career- and money-driven, his life was imbalanced—he was exhausted and unhealthy. This unbalanced lifestyle culminated in a mid-trial heart attack, which led him to quit law and seek a new way of life.

Julian’s heart attack is a cautionary tale: If your goals don’t promote balance in your life, sooner or later that imbalance will catch up with you. When it does, the results could be devastating.

Set Positive Goals Using the Four Human Gifts

Covey says that in order to make positive changes in your life and strengthen your personal integrity, you need to use your human gifts to create principle-based goals. However, people’s goals tend to lean heavily on just two of the four gifts: creativity and willpower. They use creativity to imagine the situation they want and think of how to make that vision a reality. Then they use willpower to achieve that goal.

Without morality and self-awareness to guide you, you’re likely to set goals that lead to undesired outcomes. According to Covey, you need to use your morality to make sure that your goals grow naturally out of your mission, passion, and principles. You also need self-awareness to make sure those goals are realistic for you. Let’s look more closely at how to use each of these human gifts to set effective goals in your life.

What Is a Goal?

Psychologist Timothy Carey writes that a goal is our concept of how some small part of the world should be. That concept could be anything from how much we should weigh to what position we should have in a company. He also says that literally everything we do is driven by some kind of goal. When you’re hungry, your goal is to eat; when you’re tired, your goal is to rest and recover your strength.

In short, our goals are an essential part of who we are, and that’s why Covey says it’s crucial to make sure that you’re using all four human gifts to set those goals. Granted, simple goals like eating when you’re hungry aren’t likely to lead to unfortunate outcomes; however, more complex and long-term goals like your career or your family need to be carefully weighed with morality and self-awareness to make sure that you’re staying true to yourself and your ideas of how the world—or your life—should be.

Use Morality to Create Principle- and Mission-Based Goals

When you set a goal, you’re choosing a result you want to create in your life—but what’s dictating that choice? According to Covey, if your goal is influenced by others’ values and expectations, then you may be setting yourself up to pursue a goal that’s unrealistic or that doesn’t align with your principles and mission. For example, if you’re striving to become a doctor because that’s what your parents want you to do, you may find that medical work doesn’t make you feel happy.

On the other hand, if you use your conscience to create a goal that’s inspired by your mission and based on universal principles, it’ll always be a worthwhile effort because pursuing it will bring you closer to your mission. In addition, the passion of your vision will energize you as you work to accomplish your goal. If your goal is still to become a doctor, but you’re doing it because you want to heal people and cure diseases, you’ll be much more motivated and feel much more fulfilled.

Covey suggests that you check in with your conscience by asking three simple—but critical—questions:

  1. What? What do you want to accomplish? What do you want to contribute to the world? What result are you aiming for?
  2. Why? Why do you want to achieve this goal? Is it an outgrowth of your mission, principles, and essential needs?
  3. How? How will you achieve your goal? This includes both concrete steps that you’ll take, and how you’ll keep yourself motivated.

Conscience and Confidence

In The Magic of Thinking Big, author and life coach David J. Schwartz draws a clear connection between conscience and confidence. He says that when you go against your conscience—when you do something that you know is wrong, or not in line with your values—it reflects in how you feel and how you behave. As a result, not only do you feel badly about yourself, others around you also become suspicious and uncomfortable.

The same principle holds true for setting goals: If you set a goal that isn’t in line with your conscience and your mission, it won’t feel right. You’ll feel guilty or uncomfortable about pursuing that goal, and the people around you might see you in a more negative light as a result.

Use Your Self-Awareness to Build Your Personal Integrity

As mentioned earlier, making and keeping commitments to yourself and others builds up your sense of integrity, while breaking commitments damages it. According to Covey, the key to making commitments that you can keep is to use your self-awareness to evaluate whether the goals and commitments you’re making are small enough to be achievable, yet large enough to be satisfying.

When you do fail to reach a goal, self-awareness helps you to understand why that happened. If you realize that you set an unrealistic goal, you can use that information to adjust your expectations going forward.

Covey says that self-awareness also helps you recognize when changing circumstances make a goal impossible or unwise. Rather than allowing that change to damage your sense of personal integrity, understand that sometimes situations are simply out of your control, and that’s not a reflection on your abilities or your character. This understanding will allow you to let go of goals that aren’t serving your mission or your passion anymore.

Self-awareness requires being deeply honest with yourself, although it can be difficult. You need to honestly ask yourself if you have not only the ability, but also the drive to achieve a particular goal. Furthermore, ask yourself whether you’re willing to take full responsibility for your personal growth as you work toward that goal, including taking responsibility for any failures along the way.

Covey asserts that setting and reaching goals that are both realistic and challenging is an empowering process that fosters inner peace and personal growth.

Why and How Do We Lie?

Rule 8 of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life is: Act according to your personal truth. This rule encompasses being honest with yourself as well as with others—in other words, acting with integrity.

In order to help you become more honest, Peterson explains why and how we lie.

Why we lie:

How we lie:

Peterson adds that lying to yourself and deflecting responsibility will twist your thinking into bitterness and anger at the world for not conforming to your lies. Therefore, it’s crucial to be honest with yourself and with others, to avoid getting trapped in that kind of thinking.

Setting and Achieving Principle-Based Goals

In addition to using all four human endowments, Covey suggests three strategies to help you set effective, principle-based goals.

1. Set context goals. Look at each of your goals not only in the context of what you want to achieve (your mission statement and your long-term goals), but also in the context of why and how you want to achieve them. Doing so will make it more likely that you’ll find ways to meet multiple needs and fulfill multiple roles at the same time.

For example, say that one of your goals is to read more books. In considering why you want to read more, you recognize that it’s because you want to explore new ideas and different perspectives. That realization might drive you to change from the contextless goal of “read more” to the context-based goal of “join a book club,” where you’ll be encouraged to read things you might not choose for yourself and to discuss what you read with other people.

With this context goal, while achieving your original goal of reading more, you’re also meeting your essential needs of connection and learning.

What’s the Reason for the Goal?

Simon Sinek’s business guide Start With Why offers another reason why context goals are helpful: Your reasons for doing something are also your motivation for doing it.

For example, if you want to lose weight just because your doctor said you should, that’s probably not a very strong motivator; most likely you won’t succeed. However, if you want to lose weight so that you can feel better and more confident, or so that you have more energy to play with your children, you’re more likely to succeed. That’s because the reason behind the goal—the context—is much stronger and more motivating.

If you can’t think of a compelling “why” for one of your goals, consider whether that’s a goal you really need to be pursuing.

2. Make a “maybe” list. Covey suggests keeping a list of goals that you aren’t quite ready to commit to yet.

If you don’t write those goals down, they’ll just bounce around your mind and clutter up your thoughts. However, if you put every goal you think of on a to-do list, it’ll grow faster than you can keep up with and mix important goals with unimportant ones.

Therefore, a “maybe” list is an ideal solution: It gives you a place to put your ideas while you consider whether they’re realistic and in line with your mission statement.

What Goes On a Maybe List?

In Getting Things Done, David Allen suggests some activities and goals that would be appropriate for a maybe list:

In short, a maybe list is a place to put ideas that intrigue you, but that you’re not ready to commit to or schedule time for yet.

3. Set weekly goals. Don’t just think long-term; set weekly goals that build up your integrity and get you working toward your mission statement. These short-term goals will serve as constant reminders of your principles, your mission, and your vision.

(Shortform note: According to the progress principle, achieving small, daily accomplishments is the single most effective way to boost employee morale. That same principle applies to self-leadership: Reaching and celebrating your small, weekly goals will keep you motivated to work toward fulfilling your mission statement.)

4. Determine your convictions vs. your interests. Even among the goals on your to-do list (rather than your “maybe” list), there will be some that feel more important to you than others. Therefore, Covey recommends that you go through your list and recognize which goals are convictions: Things that you’re determined to accomplish no matter what. These are the goals that will hurt your integrity if you fail to reach them. Convictions might include important meetings and appointments, family time, or personal projects that are meaningful to you.

Alongside your convictions are your interests: Goals you’d like to work toward, but that you’re not as personally invested in. Falling short of these goals, or putting them off for another time, will not damage your sense of integrity. Common interests include physical fitness, as well as hobbies that are enjoyable but not especially meaningful.

(Shortform note: In Awaken the Giant Within, life coach Tony Robbins elaborates on what convictions are: In short, a conviction is something you believe in so strongly that you’ll do almost anything to uphold it. You might even feel like giving up on a conviction would be giving up a part of who you are. Naturally, this means that convictions are powerful motivators, for better or for worse. That’s why Covey says it’s crucial to use self-awareness and morality to make sure your convictions are positive and constructive ones.)

Create Synergy Among Your Goals When Possible

Synergy is the concept that a whole can be greater than the sum of its parts, the way different pieces of a car work together to create a means of transportation. Covey urges you to apply that principle to your goal-setting: If you combine activities to accomplish multiple goals at once, you can achieve more than if you’d dealt with each separately.

For example, if today’s goals include recreation and family time, why not invite your kids to go on a walk, or play a board game with you? You’ll address two goals—in two different roles—at once. Plus, you might find a new activity that you all enjoy doing together, which is a better outcome than if you’d addressed those two goals separately.

You can take synergy a step further by working together with your family, friends, or housemates. Consider setting a weekly meeting time: During that meeting, look for ways to create synergy by coordinating your activities to achieve everyone’s goals more effectively.

However, Covey urges us to remember a couple of things about synergy. First, the point of synergizing your goals is to achieve better results, not to cram more goals into each day. Second, some tasks—meditation, for example—require dedicated time and focus, so you might not be able to create synergies with such activities. Just focus on creating synergy where possible, and don’t toss out important activities that don’t achieve multiple needs..

Another Approach: High-Level Goals

Another way to make sure that your goals support and synergize with each other is to break your goals into levels, as Angela Duckworth suggests in Grit.

Your high-level goals are what Covey would call your mission statement: The things you ultimately want to achieve in your life. Mid-level goals are long-term goals that support your high-level goals—for example, if your high-level goal is to fight climate change, a mid-level goal would be earning a degree in a relevant field. Finally, your low-level goals are simple, short-term goals that support your mid-level goals—for example, doing your homework and getting to class on time so you can earn that degree.

If your low-level goals don’t support your mid-level goals, or your mid-level goals don’t support your high-level goals, then you lack synergy. Accomplishing a low-level goal with no synergy is a dead end. Conversely, trying to achieve a mid-level goal with no low-level goals supporting it will be difficult. Therefore, it’s important to make sure that your goals synergize and support each other whenever possible.

Exercise: Set a Goal

Think of something that you’d like to accomplish. This could be a long-term life goal, or it could be something with a shorter time frame like a week or a month.

Part 2.3: Develop a Weekly Plan

A key aspect of effective Zone 2 scheduling is choosing the right time frame for your planning. Covey suggests planning within the framework of a week; he believes it’s a balanced compromise between daily planning and long-term planning. A weekly schedule connects a big-picture perspective with day-to-day actionables.

In this section, we’ll explore some of the benefits of weekly planning.

(Shortform note: Life coach Brynn Johnson offers one possible benefit to weekly planning: You can start your Monday feeling calm and in control, instead of anxious about the upcoming week of work or school. With that goal in mind, Johnson suggests using each Sunday to plan for the week ahead.)

(Shortform note: First Things First provides a weekly worksheet that includes space to carry out each of the following steps, but you can use any planner, digital scheduler, or simply a piece of paper to implement the Zone 2 organizing process.)

Weekly Planning Encourages Balance and Perspective

Covey believes that a week encompasses a natural balance of life: It includes work or school days, evenings, and weekends. Therefore, he suggests that you set aside time for a weekly planning session, where you’ll prepare for the week ahead.

Planning through a weekly lens is all about balancing the big picture and the details. Your mission statement provides the “whole,” or the big picture, while the daily and weekly time management addresses the “parts”: your roles and your goals.

If you get too caught up in the whole, you lose focus and can’t take effective action—but if you get lost in the details, you’ll end up spending time on things that don’t serve your mission. Therefore, in order to maintain perspective, Covey recommends that you start with the big picture, zoom in to see the details (your weekly and daily goals), then zoom out again to see how those goals fit into your mission.

Use the Parts to Evaluate the Whole

In The 12 Week Year, author and CEO Brian P. Moran also pushes for weekly schedules as crucial steps toward larger, long-term goals—in other words, as parts of the whole.

He adds two elements that Covey doesn’t include to ensure that your weekly plans are effective and carried out properly:

Moran’s scoring system makes no allowance for how lengthy or difficult each task is. You may find it helpful to weigh certain activities more heavily than others; it makes the system a bit more complicated but gives a better overall view of your progress for the week.

Create Time Blocks in Your Schedule

One useful strategy for scheduling your priorities is to set aside blocks of time for high-priority Zone 2 activities. Doing so helps ensure that you’re making time for important tasks while keeping your schedule flexible.

For example, you might make a two-hour time block every Saturday morning for housework. That doesn’t mean that every Saturday, you’ll start working on chores strictly at 9 a.m. and end at 11; rather, blocking out this time helps you schedule other activities around it and ensure that the housework still gets done.

The other benefit of time blocks is that they create consistent times for activities that other people will become aware of, and plan around. Your friends will know you’re most likely going to decline any invites for Saturday morning plans, because that’s your housework time.

Covey warns you not to completely fill your schedule with time zones—rather, use them to make sure you allocate time for high-priority activities. That way, if a one-time event disrupts a time zone—for example, a doctor’s appointment in the middle of your housework block—you’ll have the flexibility to move the housework to another time slot and still accomplish all of your goals.

(Shortform note: Peter Drucker’s book The Effective Executive was one of the first to talk about time blocking. In it, Drucker suggests breaking your schedule into blocks that are as large as possible—four to five hours per block at least. While that might not be practical for individual activities (most of us don’t have the time or interest to take a four-hour walk, for example), it works well for categories that you can subdivide into other tasks. For instance, if you set aside a four-hour block for family activities, you might subdivide that into two hours for a movie and two hours for board games.)

Build Preparation Time into Your Schedule

Covey says that people often get stuck trying to catch up with pressing tasks simply because they didn’t take enough time in advance to prepare for those tasks. Weekly organizing prevents that problem; it lets you see what’s coming up and build in adequate preparation time.

For example, if you do your weekly planning on Sunday, as Covey suggests, and you see that the week ahead includes an important exam on Thursday, you can schedule some time each day to prepare for it. Then you won’t get caught off-guard and end up cramming the night before the exam.

(Shortform note: Clinical psychologist Jeffrey Nevid suggests that you also build some worry time into your schedule. If you’re a chronic worrier, setting a particular block of time where you’re allowed to just sit and worry might help you get it out of your system, so to speak. However, that also prevents you from spending all day, every day worrying about things that you can’t control. Once your worry time is over, you get back to work on the things that you can change.)

Stay True to Your Mission in Each Moment

No matter how carefully and thoughtfully you plan your week during your weekly organizing session, or review the day’s plans and priorities each morning, unexpected events and demands are bound to come up.

That’s why Covey’s Zone 2 organizing process is not simply about making your weekly plan and sticking to it—it’s meant to empower you to navigate those unexpected events along the way. Zone 2 organizing keeps you closely connected with your mission, gifts, and principles to stay true to yourself through all of life’s twists, from medical emergencies to power failures.

Covey says that it’s easy to get frustrated and blame other people or external circumstances when unexpected events disrupt your carefully curated schedule, but you always have control over how you’ll respond: You can make your choice based on pressure and others’ expectations, or you can make your choice according to your conscience. When you let your conscience and self-awareness guide your decisions in these moments—just as you did to create your personal mission and your schedule—you’ll make principle-centered decisions that greatly improve your quality of life.

Take Responsibility, Not Blame

When unexpected events and emergencies crop up—which, as Covey says, they inevitably will—don’t use them as excuses to give up on your goals or your tasks. In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson advises that you instead consider your situation (without assigning blame to yourself or anyone else), and then take responsibility: Make an active, conscious choice about how you’ll respond to it.

Manson draws an important and often-overlooked distinction between taking blame for your situation and taking responsibility for it. It’s tempting to blame outside forces for your problems and use that as an excuse to not even try to make things better—you just convince yourself that it’s outside of your control and there’s nothing you can do.

Manson warns us against that temptation by saying that it doesn’t matter who or what is to blame for your situation (whatever that situation is); what’s important is that you actively and consciously decide how you’ll respond to it. In other words, your problems may not be your fault, but dealing with them is still your responsibility.

Make Principle-Centered Choices

To make principle-centered decisions, you must commit to listen to and act on what your conscience dictates. According to Covey, this works because your conscience will always point you toward universal principles.

But how do you know if the voice you’re hearing is really your conscience, instead of some outside influence like societal pressure or conditioning?

To help you recognize your conscience, Covey suggests that you think for a moment about a relationship in your life that’s deeply important to you—one that you feel needs to be improved. What’s something you could do that would greatly improve that relationship? How do you know? Most likely, you don’t know from any specific experience or from a process of logical thinking, you just know; it feels right.

When you face moments of choice, it helps to have specific questions that guide the way you ask your conscience how to act. Covey suggests asking whether it’s a situation that you can control, whether it’s related to your mission, and what universal principles apply to it. You may also want to ask if there are other solutions that you haven’t considered yet. In addition, Covey suggests asking questions that can help you determine the principle-based choice to make. Remember the what, why, and how questions from the section on setting goals.

Covey says that pausing to ask these questions gives you a moment to reconnect with universal principles, and it empowers you to channel those principles and your conscience as you make your choice. This pause pulls you away from making a knee-jerk decision based on urgency, or stubbornly sticking to your predetermined schedule when a better option might be presenting itself. Just be sure that when you ask your conscience what you should do, you commit to follow through on what it tells you, even if you don’t like the answer.

Ask With Kindness

In Radical Acceptance, Brach also discusses asking yourself questions in order to figure out what you’re experiencing and how you want to respond to it. However, while Covey’s approach to this process is a sort of interrogation, Brach suggests treating it like a friendly conversation—imagine that you’re asking a close friend what she thinks about your situation.

The key to Brach’s approach is that you’re not looking to judge your experiences or change anything; you’re just trying to figure out what your inner self is telling you. It’s also crucial that, once you have the answer, you accept it—just like Covey says you have to accept and act on what your conscience tells you.

Covey believes that a sense of certainty means the knowledge came from your conscience. The more you listen to your conscience, the more you’ll be able to recognize and act according to its influence. This process takes time, effort, and integrity—it’s not always easy to do what your conscience tells you is right—but following your conscience is the only way to live by universal principles and cultivate greater quality of life.

The Social Proof Principle

Listening to your conscience can also protect you from falling victim to the risks of the Social Proof Principle: the tendency to follow along with what other people do and think. In Influence, psychology professor Robert Cialdini explains that this habit served our ancestors extremely well—for example, if everyone else was running away, it probably meant there was something dangerous nearby. However, if what everyone else is doing seems wrong, you may be seeing manufactured social proof, or victims of such manufactured proof.

Manufactured social proof means that an outside influence is knowingly and intentionally manipulating people’s reactions to a situation. Those reactions could be as innocuous as laughing along with a pre-recorded laugh track, or as deadly as the influence of propaganda and mob mentality in the January 6th attack on the US Capitol.

Learn From Your Experiences

The last step in Covey’s Zone 2 weekly organizing process is to evaluate your experiences from the past week to inform your choices for the coming week. The value of each week is not just what we accomplish during it, but what we learn from it and how we apply that to the weeks that follow. This learning process creates an upward spiral of growth.

To effectively learn from the past week, you need to know how to learn. In Limitless, Jim Kwik describes three crucial components to learning (no matter what it is you’re trying to learn):

Strategies for Evaluating Your Week

Using a personal journal or making notes on the back of each week’s schedule may be helpful in your weekly evaluation practice. Some people find it useful to create a list of five or six questions to ask yourself before you begin planning for the following week.

Your questions will be personal and meaningful to you, but they should explore what goals you accomplished in the previous week, what challenges you faced, what universal principles you used, and whether you made the best possible use of your time. You should also ask yourself where you fell short and how you can do better in the coming week.

Covey encourages you to be honest and self-aware while answering your questions—the more honest you can be, the greater the benefit to you and your future. Connect with your conscience as you make these evaluations and use your creative imagination and independent will to imagine how you can make positive change from these lessons.

(Shortform note: In addition to helping you learn and improve yourself, evaluating your day or your week can build up your self-esteem and sense of gratitude by illustrating what you already have and how much you’ve accomplished. One way to practice gratitude is to write down three good things that happened each day. You could combine that practice with Covey’s weekly planning and evaluating session by remembering something good that happened each day in the week that just ended, and deciding what good things you’d like to happen in the week to come.)

See Your Week in a Larger Context

Just as it’s important to connect the big picture of your life to your daily and weekly time management, it’s critical to evaluate your week in a larger context. In addition to each week’s evaluation, Covey suggests doing monthly or quarterly evaluations of your experiences and your lessons in order to see larger patterns that you might not recognize by looking at a single week.

During these evaluations, Covey suggests asking yourself some of these questions:

Your Personal Performance Review

The questions Covey suggests here are part of any good performance review—which is, in essence, what he’s suggesting you do for yourself each week and quarter. Covey wants you to examine what you’re doing, determine how effectively you’re living out your mission statement, and what you can do to improve.

Andrew Grove’s book High Output Management outlines a four-step process for performance reviews, which you can use for these personal reviews with some minor tweaking.

Part 3.1: Creating Synergy Through Interdependence

Beyond the tools and strategies already discussed in the Zone 2 organizing process, Covey says that one of the most powerful ways you can make the most effective use of your time is through creating synergy—or collaborating—with other people. Your relationships with other people have a huge influence on how you spend your time and the quality of life you create.

Traditional time management techniques are based on management and control, which causes you to see other people in a shallow way: They’re either tools to use or interruptions to your schedule. This short-sighted view ignores the potential of creating synergy with others in order to achieve both your and their goals more effectively.

By contrast, Covey’s fourth-generation approach to time management applies the skills you’ve practiced to create synergy among your roles and goals to your interactions with the people around you.

Collaboration Requires Trust

In another of his self-help books, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey explains that collaborating with other people requires trust. He breaks trust down into three levels, and he posits some likely outcomes of each level of trust:

Low trust: People who don’t trust each other will be defensive and suspicious, which will further damage any chance of a working relationship between them. Such people will not be able to collaborate in any meaningful way.

Moderate trust: People with a moderate level of trust will be polite to one another, and willing to work together up to a point. However, they will likely try to avoid confrontation and conflict, which might lead them to compromise (create a less effective solution to appease both parties) rather than truly collaborate (create a better solution than either one could alone).

High trust: People with a high level of trust will be open and honest with each other. Such people will try to understand each other and build on one another’s ideas. They will be able to collaborate by looking for mutually beneficial solutions to their problems, rather than rushing to a compromise to avoid conflict.

People’s Lives are Interdependent

Almost everyone in the world depends on others to fulfill their priorities, roles, and essential needs.

At this point, Covey encourages you to think about your priorities—the most important things in your life. You’ll probably find that most of them relate in some way to other people: For example, a goal of getting promoted at work probably connects with a desire for financial security for your family, or a desire for greater responsibility and respect.

Your roles also depend on others: Your role as a parent, spouse, sibling, child, employee, friend, or community member can only exist in the context of other people. Your goals and accomplishments are similarly interdependent: Although you might work independently to achieve your goal, you’re almost certainly using knowledge or resources that came from the work of other people.

Even fulfilling your own essential needs is interdependent.

(Shortform note: Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations takes the concept of interdependence even further than Covey does. Aurelius tells us that, not only are all human lives interconnected, but all lives are interconnected: Plants feed animals, who feed other animals, who die and feed the insects in the soil. We all exist in harmony with each other and because of each other. Therefore, Covey’s assertion that our lives are interconnected isn’t just a statement about society; it’s a fact of nature.)

The Interdependence Mindset

Covey says that individuals can’t live independently of the vast ecology formed by human relationships. We all depend on each other to live, work, and thrive—and, similarly, the parts of our lives all depend on each other, as we said when discussing essential needs and our roles.

Three principles characterize Covey’s interdependence mindset.

(Shortform note: Not only is modern society founded on interdependence, but it was that very interdependence that made humans the dominant species on the planet. While scientists have observed basic cooperative skills in other animals, widespread cooperation (outside of families or tribes), extreme skill specialization, and division of labor to take advantage of those specializations are all unique to humans. In short, interdependence doesn’t just mean that we have to rely on each other to live—it also means that we, as a species, are successful because we have to rely on each other.)

Principle #1: Public Behavior Is the Result of Private Behavior

Covey says that the problems we think of as “public problems,” such as those in organizations and society as a whole, are the result of individual choices. Many people blame “the system” without acknowledging that the system is created by individuals. Generally, you can trace problems in families, companies, and society back to the principles and choices of individuals. Therefore, these public problems are actually private problems.

For instance, family systems like marriages collapse not because marriage itself is flawed, but because the individuals in the marriage aren’t making principle-centered decisions.

Counterpoint: Systemic Problems

While it’s true that systems like families and societies are made up of individual people and their choices, Covey underestimates how much those systems are affected by established rules and habits. Remember: We don’t exist just as individuals, but as an interdependent network of people.

To give an extreme example: Gayook Wong, MSW, writes about systemic racism in the US—that is, racism that’s encoded into laws and institutions, rather than the result of individual actions. While it’s still individuals who carry out systemic racism, oftentimes those people don’t realize that they’re doing so.

Wong’s point is that, in many cases, problems are so deeply ingrained in systems that the people who live or work within that system don’t even know it’s there. Wong’s solution is education and awareness: In short, learning what the problems are so that you can avoid them (or fix them, if possible). This solution to systemic problems ties back into Covey’s human gifts of self-awareness and learning.

Principle #2: Life Can’t Be Compartmentalized

Covey asserts that you need to make principle-centered decisions in your private life if you want to be able to make principle-centered decisions in your public life. You may think that you can keep your private life separate from your public life—but if you’re having personal problems, they’re going to show up in your work. For instance, if you’re continually arguing with your spouse, you’ll come to work tired, short-tempered, and distracted.

The Negative Effects of Stress

It’s true that our private lives impact our public lives, as Covey says. However, the opposite is also true: Stress from work and other areas of life harms our private relationships too. There are a few reasons for this:

In short, stress—no matter which area of life it comes from—affects all areas of life negatively. Just like each person is part of the interdependent network of humanity, each of your roles is part of the interdependent network of your life.

Principle #3: Trustworthiness Leads to Trust

Trust is essential to effective communication and positive relationships, and therefore essential to public life. But Covey argues that trust starts in the personal sphere of the individual, with trustworthiness. If people aren’t trustworthy, there’s no way to build trust among them, and relationships and systems collapse.

For instance, if your employer speaks negatively to you about another employee, the employer is demonstrating that he can’t be trusted to support his staff in their absence. He’s showing his untrustworthiness. Even if he hasn’t said negative things about you, you can no longer trust him. Therefore, Covey says, the strength of the social glue of trust depends on the trustworthiness of individuals.

(Shortform note: Covey writes that the best way to build trust is to have strong values and principles, and demonstrate them to others. In Start With Why, although Simon Sinek says that trust is an instinctive feeling—impossible to rationalize or intentionally develop—he also says that we trust people whom we believe share our values, because we think that they’ll act the way we would want them to act. Furthermore, he says that we won’t trust people who haven’t proven to share our values, like the previous example with the employer bad-mouthing other employees.)

A Lesson in Interdependence

Covey’s three principles of interdependence have more to do with how you can be reliable and contribute to society, rather than how society can help and support you.

So, to illustrate the benefits we all receive from being part of a larger society, a YouTube video from the channel How To Make Everything shows how difficult it would be to make a simple chicken sandwich if you had to do everything yourself: It took six months and cost $1,500.

By contrast—because we live in a society with extreme specialization and division of labor—you can buy that same sandwich at any deli for less than $10, or make it at home using ingredients from the grocery store.)

Redefining What’s Important

Covey says that shifting from an independence mindset to an interdependence mindset changes how we approach many different situations. We start asking questions like:

(Shortform note: To borrow a tactic from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, one way of figuring out what’s really important is to approach every task as if it’s the last thing you’ll ever do. Ask yourself: If you were to pass away tomorrow, would what you’re doing right now matter? If the answer is no, then Aurelius says you’re chasing a selfish goal that doesn't give back to the people around you.)

Interdependence and the Four Human Gifts

Covey believes that the four human gifts are the keys to shifting to an interdependence mindset:

  1. Your self-awareness allows you to be aware of how you impact others. Instead of just thinking in terms of what people can do for you, you also think about what you can do for others.
  2. Your morality gives you an awareness of the collective conscience. You find satisfaction in establishing a shared vision with your family or team, and you enjoy working toward that vision together.
  3. Your willpower allows you to form an interdependent will with others. You find opportunities to create win-win solutions, and you hold each other accountable while enacting those solutions.
  4. Your creativity contributes to the collective imagination of the group. You find that, together, you can come up with more creative and effective solutions to problems than you could on your own.

Different Ways to Connect With Others

Covey believes that the four human gifts, when used correctly, will show you that you’re part of a much larger collective of people and help you contribute to that collective. In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has a rather different (and more controversial) approach to finding that human connection: nature walks, hallucinogens, and partying.

However you do it, Covey and Haidt agree that it’s both possible and healthy to move away from a self-centered mindset, and begin seeing yourself as part of a larger group.

The Myth of Independence

Despite all his talk of interdependence, Covey still acknowledges that independence is important: It allows you to stay true to yourself and act with integrity in difficult situations. However, focusing too heavily on independence creates a dangerous imbalance in our lives.

Covey says that this imbalance arises because an independent mindset goes hand-in-hand with a focus on efficiency over effectiveness. People who think they’re supposed to do everything themselves start feeling like there’s not enough time to achieve their dreams and experience all that life has to offer. As a result, they try to accomplish as many things as possible while neglecting their essential needs.

Focus Both on Yourself and on Others

Covey’s point here is that, counterintuitively, people who focus only on themselves end up harming themselves in many different ways. Adam Grant’s book Give and Take explains why: Caring for yourself vs. caring for others isn’t a zero-sum game. In other words, focusing more on others doesn’t mean focusing less on yourself.

Also, while Covey says that caring for others helps you to take care of yourself, Grant says that the reverse is also true: Caring for yourself helps you more effectively care for others. Selfless givers are self-destructive and impulsive; they give everything they can of themselves to whoever needs it until they burn themselves out. Givers who also look after their own needs are choosier: they give what they can afford to give, to the places where it will have the most impact. Not only is the latter type of giving more sustainable, Grant says that it’s actually more effective.

In short, taking care of yourself helps you to care for others, and vice versa—that is the meaning of interdependence.

Exercise: Examine Your Mindset

Consider a situation that you approached with an independence mindset—in other words, you thought you had to deal with it all on your own. Consider how you might have handled it differently.

Part 3.2: Finding Solutions Where Everybody Wins

Covey asserts that a key aspect of having an interdependent mindset is having an everybody-wins mindset, meaning that you approach winning by looking for ways to accomplish your goals as well as others’ goals through cooperation. This helps to ensure that you’re using your time—and others’ time—as effectively as possible. He warns that society teaches us to have a “win-lose” mindset—if you win, someone else must lose, and vice versa. But to reach your goals in an interdependent world, you need to shift your mindset to understand that winning doesn’t mean defeating someone else.

The Infinite Game Mindset

Simon Sinek’s book The Infinite Game draws a line between “finite games” (games where somebody wins and the game ends) and the titular “infinite games” (games that never end). Most things that we think of as games—from Monopoly to Fortnite—are finite games. Things like battles, elections, and boxing matches are also finite games. The thing they all have in common is that the “game” ends with clear winners and losers. Conversely, things like your career, your family, and your romantic relationships are infinite games: There’s (hopefully) no point where you declare that you’ve “won” a relationship and end it. The objective in an infinite game is to do as well as possible, and keep playing for as long as you can.

Covey’s “win-lose” mindset comes from finite game thinking: For you to win, someone else must lose—and if someone else wins, that means you’ve lost. It may help to recognize that you’re actually playing an infinite game, where you don’t have to be in competition with the other players because there’s no such thing as a winner or a loser.

How to Create a Win-Win Solution

Covey lays out three steps to creating a solution where everyone wins:

1. Approach the problem with a group-oriented mindset. To make sure that everybody wins, you first need to acknowledge that individual success at the expense of the group isn’t true success.

(Shortform note: It’s an oft-cited fact that any percent of zero is zero. If the group as a whole fails, it won’t matter what percentage of the effort you contributed or what percentage of the rewards you think you’re entitled to—you’ll still end up with nothing.)

2. Listen first, then speak. The second step involves listening to the other person or people, and seeking to understand their points of view. Don’t add your own thoughts until you understand all sides of the issue, and others in the group are satisfied that you understand. This ensures that you’re not only listening, but correctly understanding the issues at hand.

(Shortform note: In Difficult Conversations, the authors say that many of us assume listening is passive—that we’re supposed to sit quietly and absorb what the other person is saying. However, they argue the reverse: listening is often an active process. In brief, they say that a good listener is someone who pays attention to the speaker’s tone and body language—not just the words—and asks questions as necessary to make sure he understands.)

3. Synergize. The last step is to create a list of alternatives that are better than the solutions that any individual could come up with or accomplish alone.

Example: Our Iceberg Is Melting

The business fable Our Iceberg Is Melting illustrates how working together can yield powerful results. In the story, a penguin colony on a melting iceberg must find a way to save the colony before the iceberg falls apart.

The book focuses on how to lead a group or organization in order to make changes that would be impossible on your own. According to Iceberg, there are six steps to this process:

By using this process, a small group of penguins was able to accomplish the unthinkable: Getting the entire colony to pack up and move to a new, safer iceberg.

Creating a Shared Vision

Covey believes that every interdependent unit benefits from having a shared vision. In fact, he says that most problems in families and organizations arise from the absence of a shared vision—people become confused about what goals they’re collectively working toward or, worse, they aren’t working together at all.

A shared vision taps the creativity, motivation, and initiative of every individual involved; it’s a type of constitution that gives the group clear criteria on which to base decisions. But in order to reap these benefits, the group must create a mission statement articulating a shared vision that empowers everyone.

When creating your shared mission statement, ensure that it:

(Shortform note: One key element that Covey doesn’t list is that effective group mission statements inspire the group members to work toward that shared vision. In The Leadership Challenge the authors list the second principle of leadership as “Be Inspirational” (second only to “Set the Example”) because engaging people’s emotions and imaginations ensures the best results. They promise much greater effectiveness from people who want to work than from people just acting out their roles because they “have to”—like an employee at a job she hates, or a sullen teenager being forced to spend time with his family.)

Developing Shared Responsibility Agreements

Once you’ve created a shared mission statement, it’s time to create a shared responsibility agreement, which establishes how you will collectively reach the goals set out in your mission statement, and how you’ll all share in the rewards.

Creating such an agreement will take time, but in the long run, you’ll save much more time than you spend. That’s because addressing these issues beforehand will limit the problems that come from miscommunication, as well as unclear expectations and objectives.

Covey lays out five parts to a shared responsibility agreement:

  1. Desired Outcome: What outcome do we want to achieve? Make sure to set a goal or goals that everyone considers a win, and that addresses all four essential needs.
  2. Parameters: What moral, legal, and logistical limits do we need to consider? How much authority does each person in the group have? What kinds of action can each person take without consulting the others?
  3. Assets: What money, people, and technology do we have to work with? Also consider how the group will access and share those resources.
  4. Criteria: How will we know we’ve reached our goal? What criteria will we use to measure our success individually and as a group? How will we respectfully and effectively hold each other accountable?
  5. Stakes: What will happen if we achieve our goals? What will happen if we don’t achieve our goals? Establish clear rewards for people who fulfill their duties to the group, and penalties for those who don’t, so that everyone understands what’s at stake for the group and individually.

Go Beyond the Letter of the Agreement

The Harvard Business Review explains why all five parts of this shared agreement are necessary:

The most common issues with shared agreements come from misunderstandings and “benign neglect.” In other words, people have different understandings of what they’ve agreed to, and they don’t realize that until it’s too late. That’s why it’s crucial to make sure that everybody’s clear on the spirit of the agreement, not just the terms of it.

Part 3.3: Empowering Yourself and Others

To find and implement win-win solutions, everyone needs to have the autonomy to carry out their own roles. However, Covey notes that many employees aren’t empowered to make their own decisions, and they aren’t given the freedom to take initiative on their own projects. This is bad for individuals’ job satisfaction and professional growth, and it’s also bad for the company.

If you’re an employee in an organization that doesn’t trust its employees, with managers who micromanage your work life, you may think there’s nothing you can do to improve the situation. However, Covey says that thought is the actual problem. Even if you’re not the leader of your group, you can still empower yourself and lead others by focusing on what you can influence, instead of what you can’t.

In this section, we’ll look at three things you can do to empower yourself and others, regardless of your position within the organization.

Help Your Group Improve With a Growth Mindset

In her self-help book Mindset, Carol Dweck talks about two different ways of thinking:

Covey doesn’t use the phrase “growth mindset,” but that’s what he means by empowering yourself and others: Understanding that, no matter what your position in the group is, there are always things you can do to improve the group’s performance and morale.

Step #1: Create Empowering Environments

To create an empowering environment, Covey believes that you need four conditions:

The Fifth Condition: Your Workspace

One thing Covey overlooks in creating an empowering environment is the physical environment you’re working in. As Malcolm Gladwell explains in The Tipping Point, our surroundings (what he calls “context”) greatly influence our behavior. For example, consider how you’re likely to dress and act if you’re eating at McDonald’s versus eating at a high-end restaurant—at the fancy restaurant you’ll put more effort into looking nice and minding your manners.

The same principle applies to work environments. If your office is dirty and cluttered, it sends the message that you don’t really care about what you’re doing and can’t be bothered to put in the effort to keep it clean—your teammates will pick up on that context and put in less effort themselves. However, if you keep your workspace clean and organized, your teammates will see that you’re putting in effort and will improve their own efforts.

Let’s look at each of those conditions in more detail.

Condition #1: Trust

Covey says that members of a group need to be both trusted and trustworthy for everyone to feel empowered.

Trustworthiness is the combination of ability and integrity.

Covey says that both are necessary: A person who’s honest and kind, but not competent, isn’t trustworthy. Conversely, a person who’s competent but lacks integrity is also not trustworthy.

(Shortform note: While trust between team members is important, trust is a vague concept—if someone said, “I need to know that I can trust you,” would you really know what he meant? That’s why, in Dare to Lead, Brené Brown suggests talking about trustworthy behaviors instead of trust itself. For example, if one of your team members tends to overpromise and underdeliver, that’s a specific behavior you can point to as untrustworthy; more importantly, it’s something that your teammate can work on in order to build trust.)

Condition #2: Enthusiastic Team Members

Covey believes that part of feeling empowered is keeping yourself motivated and enthusiastic. That’s because an environment founded on the first condition (trust) is an environment in which you’re responsible for your own work—you won’t have supervisors hovering to make sure that you’re doing what you’re supposed to. In other words, trust and freedom are empowering, but they also come with responsibility.

If you’re the leader, Covey suggests that you ask yourself questions like: Do I let others do their work their way, or do I try to force my own ways onto them? Do I give people enough space? And, conversely, do I check in with them often enough? In other words, am I striking the right balance between freedom and support to empower and motivate my group members?

If you’re a group member, Covey suggests asking yourself: Do I take initiative, or do I wait for someone to tell me what to do? Do I come up with my own ideas and systems, or do I just go “by the book?” In other words, do I feel empowered and enthusiastic, or am I just doing what other people want me to?

Motivation Comes From Action

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson discusses our misconceptions about motivation: He says many people believe that you have to be motivated in order to work on a project, when in reality the motivation comes from working on it. Instead of imagining a straight line from motivation to action, Manson urges us to instead see it as a loop: action leads to motivation, which leads to more action, and so on.

That’s why Covey’s idea of a group where people are not just allowed, but expected, to take responsibility for their own work can lead to much better results. Those people will start their work because it’s their responsibility to do so, then they’ll discover their personal motivations to keep working on it—as opposed to working just because the supervisor is breathing down their necks.

Condition #3: Systems Suited to Goals

Covey says that when systems don’t align with the purpose they’re supposed to support, no one feels empowered. For example, if you want your salespeople to work together, but your system rewards the individuals who make the most sales, then your systems don’t support your purpose—instead of working together to get better results, your salespeople will drag down each other and your organization.

Therefore, you should find ways to align your systems with your goals wherever possible. That principle doesn’t just apply to your job: You might find opportunities in your family life, your volunteer work, and even in your hobbies. If you want your children to enjoy family time, but that time is rigidly scheduled and structured so that it feels like a chore, then your systems don’t align with your goals.

In short, Covey recommends asking yourself what systems are keeping you from reaching your goals (whatever goals those are), then ask which of those systems you’re in a position to change or influence. Once you’ve answered those questions, you’ll know where to direct your energy.

Example: Ludonarrative Harmony

To illustrate what Covey means by matching systems to their goals, we can look at an example from a very different part of life: video games. In game design, matching a game’s systems to its story is called ludonarrative harmony, and it greatly improves the player’s experience.

For example, the popular game series Dark Souls is about fighting back against hopeless odds in a bleak and uncaring world. The series features weighty, real-time combat; making the wrong move often means you can only watch as your opponent hits you back with a devastating attack. Furthermore, the series is famous for being extremely difficult, with many enemies able to kill your character in just a few hits. The difficulty and vulnerability drive home just how high the odds are stacked against you. They also give you an incredible rush of excitement when you finally manage to win a tough fight.

If Dark Souls were too easy, or if it were an unsuitable type of game like a visual novel, it would never have achieved the popularity it enjoys today.

Covey is suggesting that we apply a similar principle to work, family life, or anywhere that you’ve made a group mission statement: Make sure that you’re matching what your objectives are with how you achieve them.

Condition #4: Accountability

Covey says that accountability requires checking your actions and others’ against the goals and guidelines your group has laid out for itself. Therefore, it’s crucial to make sure that your group planning includes the specific criteria for determining responsibilities and assessing results.

As you continually check your decisions, actions, and results against the agreement, you’ll develop a progressively better sense of how you’re doing, and how you can do better.

Effective Accountability Through Respect

This condition may be challenging because it can be difficult to effectively hold people accountable when something goes wrong. An article from Psychology Today suggests that, first and foremost, you must be respectful. Your goal should not be to shame or attack the other person, but to work together in figuring out what went wrong and how to fix it.

To that end, the article suggests asking three questions:

These three questions help both of you get to the heart of the problem and figure out how to avoid that problem in the future.

Step #2: Seek Feedback

Another way Covey offers for you to empower yourself and others is to seek out feedback. In fact, he says that it’s one of the most effective ways to build both your character and competency. However, it’s also one of the hardest, because it requires humility and vulnerability. You have to recognize that you may not have an objective view of your own abilities, understand and accept how others see you and allow what you hear to influence your actions going forward.

Once you get feedback, review it carefully. Then, return to the person who gave it to you and thank them. Ask them to help you create an action plan to address their feedback.

You can seek feedback at work or at home. For instance, as a CEO, you might find that your employees want you to spend less time managing and working on projects and more time clarifying the vision for the company. As a parent, you can seek feedback from your children—they might surprise you with their maturity and thoughtfulness.

Covey offers a few guidelines to make sure that you’re getting (and giving) effective feedback.

(Shortform note: In his book Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work, leadership consultant Paul Marciano points out that feedback also serves another purpose: encouragement. In fact, Marciano suggests that feedback be roughly 80% positive reinforcement for what the person is already doing well, and only 20% about how he or she can improve performance. While Covey is right that it’s important to address problems and opportunities for improvement, he overlooks the fact that purely negative feedback—no matter how respectful—will frustrate and discourage the person you’re trying to help.)

Step #3: Serve Your Subordinates

Covey believes that the best leaders are those who serve and empower their subordinates, rather than trying to control them; he uses the term “servant leadership.”

Note that this leadership style is only possible if you have the four conditions for empowerment detailed in Step 1—you can’t let go of control if doing so leads to chaos. However, once you’ve created a high-trust environment, you should spend your time engaging in Zone 2 activities like creating a shared vision, building relationships with your staff, getting feedback, and mentoring others.

Covey says the crux of serving your subordinates is asking them how you can help, instead of telling them what to do. Make suggestions and ask questions, rather than giving instructions. This principle applies whether the organization in question is a company, a volunteer group, or a family.

According to Covey, your goal should be to help others develop the skills and knowledge to take initiative and work independently, leading to ever-improving results as you empower more and more people. In the long run, this is much more effective than telling people what to do (or doing things for them), where the outcomes will always be limited by your own abilities and motivation.

Example: Turn the Ship Around!

In Turn the Ship Around!, Naval captain L. David Marquet describes how he turned the worst-performing nuclear submarine in the US Navy into one of the best. He did so by switching his command style from what he calls leader-follower to leader-leader, which empowers subordinates to do their best work. Though Maquet called it by a different name, this embodies Covey’s idea of servant leadership.

According to Marquet, most workplaces (including the Navy) operate on a leader-follower model: Leaders give orders and followers carry them out. However, he believes that this is an outdated model designed for large-scale physical labor like mining and farming—in modern workplaces it just leads to unmotivated workers and frustrated managers. Marquet’s solution is the leader-leader style of command, where he expects each person to think and act like a leader, no matter what his position actually is.

One simple yet effective change Marquet implemented was that, instead of asking for permission or instructions, he expected his sailors to announce what they intended to do. Then their superiors would tell them to proceed, or correct their intentions if necessary. This simple change helped people feel engaged with and responsible for their work.

Common Obstacles to Empowerment

Covey warns that creating an empowering environment isn’t easy—you could meet resistance from your boss, your coworkers, and the company’s established habits. According to Covey, these are a few of the most common problems:

Problem: The boss doesn’t know what a shared responsibility agreement is, or doesn’t want to make one.

Solution: Covey suggests working with your boss to create an informal agreement without using the words “shared responsibility.” Ask for a meeting where the two of you can lay out your responsibilities as an employee, and the company’s responsibilities to you (it may help to come prepared with a list of your responsibilities and priorities, and see if your boss agrees with it). That’s step 1 of Covey’s process for creating a shared responsibility agreement. At your next meeting you can tackle step 2, and so on, until you have a shared responsibility agreement in everything but name.

(Shortform note: A boss who isn’t willing to talk over your responsibilities to each other may be described as a laissez-faire boss: someone who doesn’t want to take any responsibility or do any work, and who prefers to simply let the department run itself. It’s important not to mistake this style of leadership for servant leadership—leaving workers to their own devices is not the same thing as empowering them to do their best work.)

Problem: The boss doesn’t want to empower his employees. He wants to keep doing things the way he always has.

Solution: If you have very little influence at your workplace and little chance for advancement, it might be best to look for a new job. However, Covey says that in most cases you can still work on developing your skills and knowledge, empowering yourself rather than seeking empowerment from your boss. Eventually, the company will recognize you as somebody who can handle more responsibility and be trusted with more authority.

(Shortform note: One problem Covey overlooks here is the fact that, in some workplaces, the problems come from the executive level rather than the supervisory level. Even worse, some companies prefer having powerless employees—their only concern is for short-term profits, and they see their employees as cheap tools to replace whenever necessary. Such companies probably can’t be fixed without a complete overhaul, scrapping long-established policies (and most likely the people behind them) to install new policies that focus on employee satisfaction and empowerment. Unfortunately, that’s not always realistic. If you find yourself stuck in a toxic job, then as Covey suggests, it’s probably best to get out and look for a healthier workplace.)

Problem: The employees aren’t interested in empowerment.

Solution: Meet employees where they are. If they don’t feel comfortable taking on more responsibility or taking initiative, don’t force them. However, make it clear that you value their talents and hope that they’ll eventually want to take on more of a leadership role. You can also ease employees into empowerment by declining to solve problems for them. Instead, try asking, “What do you recommend?”

Empowerment Starts With Consideration

If employees aren’t interested in becoming more empowered, it may be a sign that they’re disinterested or disengaged from their work—in other words, that they’re just coming for the paycheck. In Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work, Marciano says the cure to disinterested employees is building personal rapport with them, which begins with showing consideration for them as people, not just as workers.

Marciano suggests a number of ways to show that type of consideration. A few examples include:

Problem: You don’t trust the people you work with.

Solution: This problem has a two-part answer.

  1. Examine the way you perceive the people you don’t trust. Covey suggests asking yourself, “Do I believe this person can change?” Assume that the people you work with have good intentions and just need some support to do their best work.
  2. Support the people you don’t trust. Covey also suggests finding ways to foster the development of colleagues or employees. Use the shared responsibility agreement to decide together which expectations are realistic and which resources and professional development opportunities could help improve performance. Also, help people evaluate themselves by asking them how well they feel they’re performing, based on the agreement.

The Growth Mindset

If you don’t think you can trust your employees or coworkers, you may be stuck in what psychologist Carol Dweck describes as a fixed mindset. In her book Mindset, Dweck explains that a fixed mindset is the false belief that people’s abilities are natural and unchangeable. For example, if you think your coworker is “bad at his job,” that’s a sign of a fixed mindset—you don’t believe that he can improve.

Dweck contrasts that fixed mindset with what she terms a growth mindset: the understanding that people can always learn new skills and improve their abilities. When Covey says to assume good intentions and support the coworkers you don’t trust, he’s encouraging you to adopt a growth mindset—to believe those coworkers can and will improve, so that you can feel comfortable trusting them.

Conclusion: Finding Peace With the First Things First Strategy

Covey believes that when you base your priorities on universal principles and put first things first, you find four different kinds of peace:

  1. The peace that comes from fulfilling your four essential needs: survival, connection, learning, and giving back.
  2. The peace that comes from developing your four human gifts: awareness, morality, creativity, and willpower.
  3. The peace that comes from cooperating with others instead of competing with them.
  4. The peace that comes from living according to your conscience.

(Shortform note: Having clear priorities and knowing how to pursue them can also foster the peace that comes from confidence: in this case, the confidence that you’ll always know the right thing to do and how to do it. In The Confidence Code, journalists Katty Kay and Claire Shipman explain that confidence (also called self-esteem) boosts your happiness and helps you feel more fulfilled—which is, after all, the end goal of Covey’s system of personal leadership.)

Obstacles to Peace

There are three roadblocks to peace that Covey says we should be aware of:

  1. Unrealistic expectations
  2. Lack of courage
  3. Pride

We’ll look at each of them in detail.

Another Obstacle: Worry

Another thing that can block peace is worry—imagining future events and how you might prevent or respond to them. In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman explains that worrying can sometimes be beneficial—it’s a way of planning ahead—but far too often, people get stuck in obsessive loops where they worry about the same problem over and over.

Goleman suggests managing anxiety through daily relaxation exercises like deep breathing and meditation. When worry does take hold, fight back by asking yourself questions and forcing yourself to think rationally about the situation.

A few examples of effective questions include:

Roadblock #1: Unrealistic Expectations

Covey says unmet expectations are one of the greatest sources of frustration in day-to-day life. When you have the expectation that you’ll check every task off your to-do list, that you won’t run into difficulties, or that everyone will agree with your ideas, unexpected issues or interruptions cause frustration. You see the people around you as problems. Conversely, when you see your daily plan as a roadmap rather than a checklist—as in Covey’s Zone 2 scheduling method—you see problems as opportunities to create better systems and empower others.

If you want to find peace, you need to mitigate frustration by changing your expectations. Examine particular frustrations to identify the unrealistic expectations at their source.

If you work with others toward a shared vision and live a principle-centered life, your expectations will become more realistic.

Counterpoint: Acceptance vs. Expectation

Tara Brach, a practicing psychologist and devout Buddhist, argues that we have little control over our lives, so we should have no expectations at all. In her best-selling book Radical Acceptance, she urges us to simply accept each experience as it comes.

According to Brach, there are two key parts of acceptance:

Brach believes that keeping a mindset of acceptance, rather than expectation, allows us to fully experience life without being overwhelmed by it.

Roadblock #2: Lack of Courage

When you lack courage, you keep doing things the way you’ve always done them, basing decisions on society’s priorities rather than your own, or not basing decisions on priorities at all. On the other hand, courage allows you to listen to your conscience and make decisions based on your principles.

You can develop courage by achieving your goals, no matter how small—for instance, your goal could be to get out of bed the first time the alarm goes off. Each time you set a goal and meet it, or keep a promise, you build your confidence. This confidence develops into courage.

Just Start Somewhere

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Manson says that when we’re stuck on a problem or afraid to pursue a goal, we can start by just doing something—anything we’re able to do in that moment. For example, if you’ve got a daunting math problem in front of you, start by just reading the question and writing down some numbers. Not only will that start getting you motivated (remember Manson’s action-motivation-action loop), but you’ll either realize that you know how to do it after all, or you’ll figure out exactly where you’re getting stuck.

By setting an extremely low bar like “write down some numbers,” you can start to overcome your fear of failure—after all, anyone could write down numbers. Once you achieve that first tiny goal, you’ll find the courage to take the next step, and the next one after that, until you’ve solved the problem.

Roadblock #3: Pride

Pride, in the sense of having too large of an ego, is the biggest hindrance to leading a principle-centered life.

If you have too much pride, you:

(Shortform note: As Ryan Holliday points out in Ego Is the Enemy, too much pride can also fill your mind with self-aggrandizing or self-promoting chatter, which blocks you from the peace and quiet you need in order to reflect and improve yourself.)

Covey says that the antidote to pride is humility. You can develop your humility by following the steps of the First Things First system to understand your true priorities; you’ll then focus on strengthening your relationships and empowering others, rather than focusing on your own ego.

(Shortform note: It’s important to note that humility doesn’t mean feeling bad about yourself or belittling yourself—rather, it means you understand that you aren’t perfect and have room to grow. An article from Psychology Today says that being humble really means being open to new ideas, and open to the possibility that you may be wrong. That open-mindedness and willingness to learn is what Covey is urging us to develop.)

Checklist: Characteristics of a Principle-Centered Person

Covey says that if you want to find true peace, you need to be a principle-centered person. He adds that principled-centered people display some or all of the following characteristics:

Be a Principled Person to Be a Principled Leader

Throughout the book, Covey emphasizes that being an effective, principled person also helps you become an effective, principled leader. Accordingly, several of the criteria he lists above and the concepts he’s previously described align with the characteristics of principled leadership, as defined by the military college The Citadel:

Exercise: Reflect on the First Things First Approach

Reflect on the lessons of First Things First and how you’ll implement them in your life.