First Things First

The weakness of this audiocassette is that you will learn the principles behind Quadrant Two Time Management, but not how to do it. As the audiocassette will tell you, you will need to buy the book, study it, and then start doing it. I thought this was so substantial a weakness that I graded the book down two stars for this limitation.

If you are pretty sure you want to use this method, go directly to the book. If you are not sure, listen to this audiocassette. I found a copy in my local library. Perhaps you can, too.

The time management technique here is intended to be a fourth generation of that method of getting more accomplished. The main different is that the goals here are to achieve more balance in your life by having you focus first on doing what is most important to you that will make the most difference. You will plan weekly, and reiterate your planning to learn from your experiences of the prior week.

Quadrant 2 is the area where activities are important, but not urgent. These activities are often overlooked, or are pushed out of the way by urgent activities, including ones that are unimportant.

The time management process is designed to handle all elements of your life, personal life as well as work. An analogy is used to putting big rocks, gravel, sand, and water into a jar. If you start with the big rocks, you can get everything in the jar. If you start in the opposite order, you'll never fit the big rocks in.

You are encouraged to develop a personal mission statement (because seeing meaning to life gives us more optimism and perserverance), consider all of your life roles, locate the highest payoff areas for those roles, make principle-centered decisions, exercise integrity in your moments of choice, and continually reevaluate how you are doing.

After you listen to this work, consider how well balanced or unbalanced your life is. Then think about what your habits are that cause you to have such imbalances. Next, start changing those habits to better ones.


An invaluable start to the day   January 21, 2004
DAVID-LEONARD WILLIS (Thessaloniki Greece)
16 out of 18 found this review helpful

Our lives are busy and full of change. Keeping our priorities in order while maintaining focus and vision is a constant challenge. We live in a society that loves short cut techniques where there is no short cut, only a path based on principles revealed throughout history. A meaningful life is not a matter of speed and efficiency but what you do and why you do it - and we need to be reminded of this everyday. The best way is to take a few minutes of quiet time before the daily rush. Our hearts and minds need nourishment and this is the purpose of this book - to provide daily nourishment through the daily reading of wisdom literature that can have a profound effect on the quality of our daily decisions by keeping us focused on what is important and preventing us being swept away by urgency. Covey believes these little daily thoughts will help us do three things - to reconnect with our big ideas and the insights that accompanied learning them; to encourage us to take a little breathing space between events and our response - a space that reconnects us to our inner compass; and to garnish our wisdom literature habit. We need to be constantly reminded of the principles that have been part of the wisdom of every successful individual and civilization. These are some of the readings that made an impression on me:

January 4: Be governed by your internal compass, not by some clock on the wall.
January 5: If the thing you are committed to is principle-centered, you become principle-centered and you walk your talk.
January 11: While you can be efficient with things you cannot be efficient - effectively - with people.
January 14: We need to move beyond time management to life leadership.
January 23: Meaning is in contribution, in striving for something higher than self.
January 29: We choose either to live our lives or let others live them for us.
January 30: The best way to predict your future is to create it.
February 6: The more involved you are, the more significant your learning will be.
February 7: What does it matter how much we do if what we're doing isn't what matters most.
February 14: More than any other factor, vision affects the choices we make and the way we spend our time.
February 18: Vision is the fundamental force that drives everything else in our lives.
February 22: There's no way we can escape accountability. We do make a difference - one way or the other. We are responsible for the impact of our lives.

I think that Covey is right. We need a five-minute reminder as we start each day to make sure that we keep our thoughts, plans and priorities pointed in the right direction because where we're headed is more important than how fast we're going.


Disappointing by comparison to other Covey titles   March 11, 2003
32 out of 33 found this review helpful

I found the description misleading and the book disappointing. The book is essentially a one-liner reference guide to Covey's book First things First. Each calendar day gives a principle and refers to a page in First Things First, so without the original text this book makes little sense. The effect of limited entrys means that in actual fact most of the pages are blank, May 3rd for example is 7 words. I have the 7 Habits, First things First, as well as other Covey titles but this is not one that comes anywhere near the expected standard.


The choice companion book of anyone who want to change.   November 20, 1997
13 out of 17 found this review helpful

Even if you feel you don't need to change, you can always improve. This author has motivation and organization understood to an exact science. And he presents it a way that's easily grasped the first time and still interesting when used as reference. Take a look at Covey and his principles, I guarantee you'll soon see how phony "DR" Robbins and his gimmicks are. Your best option is to rent it from the library, read it - and if you like it (you will) then buy it .