Seven Habits

Well, another beautiful "n things" I can recall of is "Seven Habits" from "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", a book written by Stephen R. Covey. It is a very good concept of improving oneself (and solving personal problems). It starts off with the concepts of maturity stages; Dependence, Independence and Interdependence.


Beginning with "dependence", without personal development, we will stuck here. People at this stage are inclined to deflect blame and shirk responsibily ("It's not my fault"). From here, there are three habits for self mastery.

Habit 1: Be Proactive
Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind
Habit 3: Put First Things First

Once one achieves self mastery (self-reliant, independence, take responsibility for one's actions), the next three are to do with interdependence.

Habit 4: Think Win/Win
Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, then to be Understood
Habit 6: Synergize

That this stage (interdependence), we need other people to accomplish our goals (two heads can be much better than one).

And the last habit (renewal)
Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw

Again, there are nice pictures illustrating "seven habits" all over the internet.

I am very pleased to see the Habit 3 here. I knew about the "Covey's Quadrant" time management before, from Randy Pausch's The last lecture. Let me put the 4-quadrant picture here.

Things that we must do can be classified according to two issues "important" and "urgent". We have no problem putting I "important"-"urgent" as the first priority and IV "not important"-"not urgent" as the last priority, but what about II and III ?

It turns out that many people tend to pic III over II (because it is urgent) but this model emphasizes that we need to aim to spend our time in quadrant II. If we don't do II, we will not have the idea of what is important and we will be easily diverted into responding to the urgent instead. What more is, because II is important, in time it will become I.

refs: here and here and here (in thai)