Habit #7: Sharpen the Saw

This habit is named after the popular illustration about taking time off from woodcutting in order to sharpen the saw. Of course, this time off spent sharpening will increase the amount of woodcutting you can do in a day. This habit is about allocating a portion of your time to develop and renew yourself, so you will be more effective the rest of the time.

In practice this is a CEO taking one day a month away from the business to attend a development group. It’s a professional attending continuing education. It’s making your workday a little shorter to make room for exercise.

That’s it for my review of Covey’s book of broad and timeless wisdom. You can buy it on Amazon.

Habit #6: Synergize

When you trust the people you are interacting with…

When you believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts…

When anticipate that other people will add good things to the mix, but don’t know what those additions will be,

Then you can interact in a state of creative cooperation to bring about a result that no one person in the group could have done on their own.

This is about discovering what each person has to contribute, and connecting those contributions together into something bigger.

This is the easiest for me to explain, and the hardest for me to do.

Habit #5: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

This is about listening to people and truly understanding their perspective before asking them to hear yours. It’s hard because it’s an act of giving. It requires setting aside our own needs and impulses for a while. It’s effective because everyone is better ready to listen when they feel they’ve been heard and understood. It’s wise because by listening we learn things we didn’t know before.

The second half of this is equally important. Win/win requires mutual understanding, so take your turn to speak up. But avoid the tug-of-war of two sides talking over each other by graciously accepting the role of first listener. I think this habit has huge power to turn resistance into cooperative forward motion.

Now Covey moves from the personal realm to the interpersonal.

Habit 4: Think Win/Win

This is about seeking a mutually beneficial outcome in all kinds of negotiating and interpersonal situations. The most obvious alternatives are to take advantage of the other side, or to give up too much and let the other side take advantage of you. Win/win says “If we are going to do a deal, I want a deal that’s good for both of us.”

It requires believing that the world is a place of abundance where there is plenty to go around. I don’t need to get a bigger piece of the pie than you get, or to give up my piece to you. It’s a big-pie world.

You can’t reach your goals if you give up too much, and you can’t maintain relationships if you take too much. This is about a mature balance and a creative persistence about searching for a win/win if one can possibly be found.

There’s a lot in this chapter of Covey’s book. Pulling out what I think is the central idea…

Habit 3: Put First Things First

If you know you have choices that make a difference (Habit 1), and you know where you want to end up (Habit 2), then you must be organized enough to spend actual time working toward those goals. That’s Habit 3, allocating real time in your schedule to the activities that will move you closer to the end you want.

As you know, this is harder than it sounds. Life and business crowd a lot of urgent and self-generating tasks into our days. It’s really easy to have big goals in mind, yet spend all day on these popup tasks, moving no closer to the big goals.

I try to prevent this with a entry that lives at the top of my task manager called “Big Picture Strategy”. Inside it I have sub-tasks listing the current big goals for my companies and for myself. These usually focus a few months to a year ahead. I try to look this over once per work day and take a moment to meaningful process those strategies and the actions we should be taking now to move them forward. Some days I don’t get to it and that’s life, but I think it helps keep me focused. That’s the spirit of Habit 3.