First Things First
by A. Roger Merrill, Rebecca R. Merrill, Stephen R. Covey
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Book Reviews of First Things First
Book Review: Excellent thesis camouflaged by flowery writing
Summary: 4 Stars
The author of "First Things First," Stephen Covey, Roger Merrill, and Rebecca Merrill, are all involved with the Franklin Covey Company--a company most known for training individuals and institutions in "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People." The purpose of "First Things First" is to provide an expanded, fuller treatment of some aspects of the Seven Habits. These aspects include the concepts of "Sharpening the Saw" (making time to renew and develop your mental, social, physical, and spiritual health), Quadrant II (things that are important yet not urgent), Personal Mission Statements, What Matters Most (making sure you spend your time in the most important activities and relationships), Roles and Goals, Synergy and Inter-dependence, and Leadership Styles.
Overall, this is a helpful book, but id does have some negative aspects. For those of us who have read and digested "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," much (but not all) of this book will be repetitive and feel like a waste of time. There is a great deal of overlap between "First Things First" and "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People." Second, this reviewer finds Covey, Merrill, and Merrill's writing style annoyingly syrupy. They often employ vague-yet-emotional words and phrases like "I felt blessed to have him share his deepest feelings with me," "wonderful," "deeply satisfying," "we made a real connection," and "listening to that peaceful, quiet voice deep within you." I felt talked down to when the authors wrote in this style. Instead of trying to appeal to my emotions, I would rather the authors "talk up" to me and appeal to my logical side. They are most successful when they take that approach.
There are also positive aspects to "First Things First." Chief among which is the content of the book itself. Covey, Merrill, and Merrill's main thesis--that one should strive for effective time management techniques (the clock) and also strive to make sure you're spending your time on the most worthwhile, meaningful tasks (the compass)--is profound. This thesis is developed well throughout the book and applied to a myriad of situations. This leads to another strength of the book, the variety of situations used by the authors. One would expect examples coming from the business world, but Covey also provides anecdotes related to academia while Rebecca Merrill offers numerous anecdotes applying the thesis to family life. This reviewer also appreciates the authors' focus on holistic health and balance. The definition of "balance" is one that most people think they know, but Covey, Merrill, and Merrill give a full explanation of balance and show how it is achieved in life. This was highly appreciated and influential. Further, the authors' treatment of holistic health through reading wisdom literature, relationship building, exercise and diet, character development, and the empowerment of others show that they have thought long and hard about their topic and have approached it from a number of angles.
In all, this book is recommended to just about everyone. This book is intended to be applicable to a wide audience and the authors have certainly hit that mark. Work your way through the cotton-candy language and enjoy the satisfying meat it conceals.
Book Review: It's painful to read. You should read it.
Summary: 3 Stars
I'll try to describe this book in as short a summary as possible:
It has some very great advice and techniques for time-management. It gives you a new perspective on your life and what you're doing with your time. It doesn't teach you to prioritize and shift around stuff you shouldn't be doing in the first place. It helps give you a broader perspective on what sort of things you're doing in the first place, and more importantly, what sorts of things you're not doing that you should be doing. It will have you think of yourself as a person fulfilling multiple roles, rather than someone who's drowning in a single-dimensional calendar that has no perspective on life and personal satisfaction.
Now for the cons of this book that made me give it only 3 stars instead of the 5 that it would otherwise deserve:
This book should be 75 pages tops, not 350 pages - Maybe 100 pages if a larger font was used. The author's writing style is very *very* painful for someone who doesn't come from a background of "faith". I had a tough time swallowing some of the material simply because instead of evidence, he kept asking for a leap of faith. His examples are littered with those such as (para-phrasing here) "I gave a lecture somewhere... the students were completely against my points. I asked them to look into their conscience. They started not being sure about their logical comebacks." These are the sort of arguments that a religious person makes, not someone who is trying to convince others to buy into an intelligent argument.
The other problem with the book is the appalling use of the sort of jargon that only a pointy-haired boss from a Dilbert cartoon would use. I'm an engineer; about 1/3 of the way through the book, when the author was still promising of what was about to come in the rest of the book (yes, the first 1/3 of the book is self-promotion about the book) I reached a sentence along the lines of (para-phrasing) "this book will help you use your endowments in a synergistic way according to true-north principles, to think of third-alternative solutions." Each one of those horrible made-up expressions is used tens of times. The word "synergy" is used hundreds of times in the book. I was about to close the book immediately at that point and cut my losses. I would have, if it wasn't for the very concise testimonial from Larry King: "I can't think of anyone who wouldn't be helped by [this book]." Notice he didn't say the stuff is great writing. He just said it's helpful.
I read the book to the end, and it certainly did help. I have changed how I manage my time and I feel indebted to the author for it. I highly recommend, if you feel like you're spread too thin in your life, for you to read this book. I also recommend to the author to get rid of most of the fluff in the book and come out with the Cliff notes. A similar book in management (which is about leadership, not time-management) is "Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the box". That book has a brilliant writing style and so far I haven't been able to put it down too often. If you're reading this book, you might want to look into that as well, for your self-improvement.
Book Review: Covey's Best Work
Summary: 4 Stars
I found this book to be surprisingly good for what it was. I picked it up because someone told me it was good for time management strategies, but I found it was nicely more than that. It indeed is about time management, but it also integrates a well thought out personal philosophy that asks the reader to really think about what's important to him or her. In addition, he suspects that after you ask yourself about those values, you'll likely be like everyone else in wanting to live, learn, love and leave a legacy in the world. This is a nice take on the enterprise of time management, because it gives everything context. If time management is about organizing for efficiency, it's crucial to do some soul searching to realize what's important in life in order to organize around. In essence, Covey uses this work to get the reader to not fall into the trap of efficiency for efficiency's sake, because that doesn't lead to fulfillment, only more tasks neatly organized that might well be more exasperating. Instead, Covey notes that there are ways to overlap things in our life that are truly meaningful to us.
But there are quite a few bad things about the book as well. First and foremost, Covey does something that is a pet peeve of mine with books, writing forever about what's going to come later on in the book. It's like the author keeps telling you what will be talked about instead of talking about it. That just irritates me. Though it does diminish later in the book, it made my skin crawl for the first half of the book. As well, it does take him a bit too much time to get into the meat of exercises, choosing to expand a little too much on the more philosophical concepts for quite a while in the beginning. Not that he should've have talked about them, but each time he talks about one of those underlying core concepts, he could really get the message across in a fourth of what he uses to say what needs to be said. So, the book does seem a bit drawn out.
I think some of the other reviewers that were negative on this book were a bit harsh about the unrealistic nature of its message. I think Covey well realizes that we don't always have the luxury of deciding to do what we're most passionate about, but even then, such a work as Covey's can be practiced as it very much mirrors Sartre-like existentialism as well as cognitive-behavioral psychology where feelings, choices and behaviors are ultimately open to the individual to practice in a respectable, thoughtful, and meaningful way with integrity. So, suffering at a monotonous job to put food on the table may well be necessary, but how one approaches that and to what greater end after simply putting food on the table in the long run, is still open to the individual. The person need not simply go to work and come home and think that's all there is because he or she is at the mercy of the world. That's exactly what Covey is saying isn't correct, which I agree with him on.
By far the best of the Covey books. I've seen some good synopsis of this book online that you might want to check out first, because, again, the material takes a while to unfold in the book which can grate on the nerves.
Book Review: Lack of story-time credibility and relevance of the "legacy"
Summary: 1 Stars
There are a couple of major problems with this book. First of all, the author devotes a significant amount of space to explaining the importance of leaving a legacy, but fails to recognize that this matters the least in terms of the largest group of people who bought this book and where they are right now in their lives. Here's the gist of how the legacy imperative is presented and what it is: There are lots of successful people out there who are worth millions and, realize at some point in their late forties to fifties that they have spent their entire lives amassing wealth and have no abstract higher purpose or meaning in their lives. This is a common cliche that we are all familiar with, but Covey insults our intelligence by acting as though we have discovered dynamite.
There is also an audience inconsistency with the legacy. It's fair to say that this book is marketed to and generally read by those who want to be more productive and make more valuable use of their time; be more successful. This implies that the mass audience for this book has not made it yet.
With that being said, the quest for leaving a legacy is really irrelevent to someone who has not yet become accomplished or aquired affluence. What good would squabbling about some abstract principle do for someone who instead needs to advance his career and manage his time more effectively? In short, Covey, in his elitist academic demeanor, fails to recognize that the quest for a legacy is a luxury that is obtained later: It may be highly relevant once you're worth 10 mil and find that your view of the world is shrouded by "the hedges of your country club", but for now, most people need to eat.
Another problem is that Covey attempts to boost his perceived credibility by telling stories of his conquests, which are highly questionable; we weren't there. For example, he conveys a story about a speech that he gave to some college students, where, during a question and answer session, many students proposed a specific argument and were effective in conveying examples to support it. He disagreed but they weren't listening to him; He admits that he felt he was on the defensive and losing support among the students as they were leaning in favor of the students' argument. He claims that he then asked each of them to pause for a minute and listen to their inner voice. After this miute, he claims that they were less defiant, didn't know what to say, or agreed with him. Are you serious? I'm really going to believe that a large group of arrogant, defiant, "intellectual" college kids who are pushing some kind of progressive moral standard argument are really going to stop in their tracks and do a 180 after something like that. The problem with such unbelievable stories like this is that they claim things happened that you would never see, and since we weren't there, can't be substantiated.
The book is also full of fluff and could have been reduced to 25% and still say the same things.
Book Review: Integrity in the Moment of Choice
Summary: 5 Stars
Much more than just a book about time management, First Things First provides a kind of operational definition of the key principles of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
In describing what is in effect a life process of principle centered living, they begin with a compelling analogy of the clock and the compass, "Our struggle to put first things first can be characterized by the contrast between two powerful tools that direct us: the clock and the compass. The clock represents our commitments, appointments, schedules, goals, activities - what we do with, and how we manage our time. The compass represents our vision, values, principles, mission, conscience, direction - what we feel is important, and how we lead our lives. The struggle comes when we sense a gap between the clock and the compass - when what we do doesn't contribute to what is most important in our lives".
It is natural then, to recognize that the starting point must be to connect with one's vision and mission for life. This leads to a consideration of the different roles that we take on in the pursuit of our mission, and the need to have goals relating to each of these roles if balance is indeed to be achieved.
The authors propose that planning be done in a weekly cycle, with the recognition that activities fall into one of the following quadrants:
* Quadrant 1 - Important and Urgent
* Quadrant 2 - Important but Not Urgent
* Quadrant 3 - Not Important and Urgent
* Quadrant 4 - Not Important and Not Urgent
They note that most of us spend the majority of our time in Quadrants 1 and 3. However, the quadrant of quality is Quadrant 2 - those things that are important but not necessarily urgent. Examples include planning, preparation, relationship building, clarification of values, prevention activities, etc.
Covey and the Merrills go on to discuss "integrity in the moment of choice" in implementing the plan as the critical point on which ultimately quality of life depends. It is the consciousness of the proactive that each is responsible for the freedom that exists in the space between the stimulus and its response.
The final part of the book deals with the multiplication of resource and capability that follows out of embracing our interdependence through synergy, relationship building, and the cultivation of agreements with win - win outcomes.
Those who are simply seeking time management tips and techniques will come away from First Things First disappointed. This book rather is deep wisdom from the inside out.
Highly recommended for those looking to implement the Seven Habits in their daily living.