The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.
—STEPHEN R. COVEY
Shifting from secondary to primary greatness means that things we too often put first in our lives should actually be last. Some things are just plain more important than others; in fact, some things are so important—your life, your health, your family—that others are trivial by comparison. If your days are filled with “fatal distractions” such as trivial work tasks, gaming, and endless entertainment, you need to press on the lever of true priorities. This chapter is about discerning the difference between first things and secondary things and making sure that first things stay first things.
When my daughter Jenny was preparing for her wedding, I visited her, expecting to find her happy. Instead, I found her frustrated.
She told me, “I have so many other projects and interests that are important to me. But right now, I have to put everything else on hold. I’m spending all my time just preparing for this wedding. I can’t even find time to be with my soon-to-be husband.”
Seeking to understand, I replied, “So this wedding is consuming you?”
She continued, “I have other work to do. I have other people and projects that need my attention.”
I asked her, “What does your conscience tell you to do? Maybe right now, your marriage is the one thing that matters most.”
She showed me her to-do list. “I schedule time to do these other things, but then I’m constantly distracted by wedding things.”
I told her, “You’re doing what matters most to you at this time. So forget your other plans for a few weeks. Relax and enjoy this great event in your life.”
“But what about life balance?” she asked, knowing that I teach this principle.
“Your life is going to be unbalanced for a time, and it should be. The long run is where you go for balance. For now, don’t even try to keep a schedule. Just enjoy yourself, and let others feel your joy. You won’t get much satisfaction from staying on schedule if you have to sacrifice first things and best things. Maybe the only role that matters this entire month will be your role as a new bride. And if you fulfill that role well, you will feel satisfied.”
What are the first things in your life? One good way to answer that question is by asking others: “What is unique about me? What are my unique gifts? What is it I can do that no one else can do?” For instance, who else can be a father to your child? a grandparent to your grandchildren? Who else can teach your students? Who else can lead your company? Who else can be a bride to your groom?
Your unique talents and capabilities determine the important work you have to do in life. The tragedy is that our unique contribution is often never made because the important first things in our lives are choked out by other urgent things. Thus, some important works are never started or finished.
In my book First Things First, coauthored with Roger and Rebecca Merrill, we suggest that the path to personal effectiveness is a balancing process. We invite people to think through this process very carefully. “What are my responsibilities in life? Who are the people I care about?” The answers become the basis for thinking through your roles. Your goals are then set by asking, “What is the important future state for each relationship or responsibility?”
Setting up Win-Win Agreements with people and maintaining relationships of trust is not an efficient process; in fact, the process is usually slow. However, once trust is in place, the work will go faster. If you’re efficient up front, you might be taking the slowest approach. Yes, it might seem more efficient to drum your decision down someone else’s throat, but whether or not he or she is committed to live by that decision and to carry it out is a different matter. When dealing with people, slow is fast; fast is slow.
Peter Drucker makes the distinction between a quality decision and an effective decision. You can make a quality decision, but if you don’t commit to it, you won’t be effective. There has to be commitment to make a quality decision effective. You may be highly efficient working with things, but highly ineffective working with people.
Efficiency is different from effectiveness: Effectiveness is a results word; efficiency is a process word. Some people can climb the ladder of success very efficiently, but if it’s leaning against the wrong wall, they won’t be effective. You can work very efficiently on the wrong priorities.
Efficiency is about working with things. You can move things around fast, you can move money around, you can manage resources, you can manage cash flow, you can rearrange your office furniture. But if you try to be efficient with people on important issues, you’ll likely be ineffective.
We can’t deal with people as though we’re dealing with things. We can be efficient with things, but we need to be effective with people. Have you ever tried to be efficient with a family member or close friend on a tough issue? How did it go?
If you go fast with people, you’ll make very slow progress. You won’t hear what they’re really telling you. You won’t understand what a win is for them. If you go slowly and get deeply into win-win thinking, you’ll find that, in the long run, it’s faster to get commitment to the right resolution for both of you.
Effectiveness applies to you as much as to other people. You should never be efficient with yourself either. For example, one morning I met with some people who were creating Personal Mission Statements for themselves. Someone said, “Creating a Personal Mission Statement is a tough process.” And I said, “Well, are you approaching it through an efficiency paradigm or an effectiveness paradigm? If you use the efficiency approach, you may try to bang it out this weekend. But if you use the effectiveness approach, you’ll keep this dialogue going until you feel at peace.”
For many people, the dominant metaphor of life is still the clock. We value the clock for its speed and efficiency. The clock has its place and efficiency has its place, but only after you’ve achieved effectiveness. The symbol of effectiveness is the compass, because it provides direction—purpose, vision, perspective, and balance. Like a compass, your conscience serves as an internal monitoring and guidance system every minute of your life.
To move from a clock mindset to a compass mindset, you focus on priorities instead of schedules. The clock can tell you when a meeting is going to be held, but it won’t tell you if the meeting is worth going to. What if the meeting diverts you from the path you know you should be on? Each day, each week, be clear on your true-north priorities so you can stay on course.
Why do people find it easy to schedule and keep appointments with others, but hard to keep appointments with themselves? If you can make and keep promises to yourself, you will significantly increase your social integrity. If you can make and keep promises to others, you will gain the higher self-discipline to keep promises to yourself.
Of course, you shouldn’t overreact if you fail. But keeping promises to yourself increases your integrity enormously.
For example, I once saw my son rebuking his little sister for rearranging his room. He had everything laid out to work on a project, but she thought the room was messy and wanted to help her brother. In the middle of his tirade, he caught himself and said, “I apologize. I’m just taking my frustrations out on you, and I know you meant well.” He apologized right then, in the heat of the moment.
Knowing that people are more important than things, and that relationships are more important than schedules, you can subordinate a schedule without feeling guilty because you superordinate the conscience, the commitment to a larger vision and set of values. When your projects are worthy ones, then your higher purpose will transcend petty concerns and matters of secondary importance.
I recommend this time-management credo: I will not be governed by the efficiency of the clock; I will be governed by the compass of my conscience.
As you build your trust levels at work, you decide daily and hourly to do what’s necessary at that time. If family needs you, you’re there. If you are in an extremely productive or creative phase, you don’t let anything interrupt. Can you imagine a doctor taking a telephone call in the middle of surgery?
Most of us are buried in urgency symbolized by the buzzing texts and ringtones that fill our lives. Most jobs call for quick actions that are both urgent and important, but don’t confuse urgency with importance. It takes real leadership to act on what is important but not necessarily urgent. The net effects of a reactionary, urgency lifestyle are stress and burnout.
One way to stay focused on the important is to plan your week before you plan your day. Weekly planning affords you a longer-term perspective, enabling you to act within the context of your mission, roles, and goals.
The highest work any of us will ever do is the creative work we are capable of—the contribution only we can make. However, too many of us sacrifice creative contribution for activities that are far less rewarding and important.
Many times I have said, “You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, unapologetically—to say no to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger yes burning inside. The enemy of the best is often the good.”
From my experience in working with executives and others who are expected to do creative and innovative work, I find that their ability to deliver often comes down to a practical question: “Where am I going to get time and resources to do this sort of work?” Much of the training in creativity and investment in innovation goes down the drain because most people don’t know how to make or take time for creative work.
Thus, they lose their creative freedom—the freedom to do their best work and make their highest contribution. They may enjoy great physical liberty, having many options and amazing mobility in their physical environment, but enjoy very little freedom, which is the internal power and discipline to exercise their options wisely. In effect, they become self-proclaimed victims of the clock, and start blaming it for their lack of productivity. The circumstances and conditions of their lives become dominant driving forces. When other people do not come through for them—when cases and fires flare out of control because people neither prevent them nor attend to them—they blame those people and say, “They have caused all my misery.”
You won’t be very creative when your energy is sapped and your mind is occupied by pressing, urgent concerns. You can’t be creative when you are defensive!
So how do you safeguard your creative freedom? Here are six principles and practices.
JUST SAY NO: NEGLECT WHAT IS URGENT BUT NOT IMPORTANT. I find that if we neglect what is urgent but not important and attend to what is important but not urgent, we can escape a chronic state of crisis and do more creative work. Busyness is the essence of management. Creativity is the essence of leadership.
Research done on companies that have won the Deming Prize, one of the most coveted quality awards, indicates that the top priority for these companies is economic performance over time.
What do these companies do differently? In Deming companies, top executives spend at least 60 percent of their time on true priorities: things that are important but not necessarily urgent, such as preparation, prevention, mission building, planning, relationship building, creation, recreation, and empowerment.
In other companies, executives spend 50 or 60 percent of their time doing things that are urgent but not important, which is the very opposite of what they should do.
The best companies focus on the things that matter most, the things that are important but not necessarily urgent. They don’t define importance as urgency. Because urgent things require action now, we tend to believe that they are important; as philosopher and educator Charles E. Hummel said, “The appeal of these demands seems irresistible, and they devour our energy. But in the light of eternity their momentary prominence fades. With a sense of loss we recall the important tasks that have been shunted aside. We realize that we’ve become slaves to the tyranny of the urgent.”9
Many people tell me, “But you don’t know my situation. I have so many balls in the air.” Actually, it is very liberating for these people to learn that they can neglect urgent, less important demands with very little impact.
KEEP THAT INTERNAL YES BURNING INSIDE. It’s much easier to say no to the urgent and the unimportant when you have a burning yes to occupy you. If you have a passion for creative work that promises much greater rewards, you can easily say no to less important tasks without experiencing guilt. You can say no courteously, with a smile, feeling free of shame, to the busy work others may demand from you.
One purpose of learning is to distinguish between the important and the unimportant. This judgment requires you to develop criteria for the use of your time that are so deeply embedded that you can say with certainty, “Wait, I won’t deal with that issue even though it is urgent and pressing. It’s just not important enough.” I can’t tell you the difference this principle has made in my life!
EARN THE CONFIDENCE OF YOUR BOSS IN YOUR CREATIVE COMPETENCE. When you start saying, “I don’t have the freedom to be creative,” that becomes your creative challenge: to gain that freedom by building your relationship with your boss and with people who influence your boss.
I’m frequently asked, “What if you think something is less important, but your boss thinks it’s very important?” My response to that question is this: What is important to another person must be as important to you as the other person is to you, or as the common cause between you. So even though you think it’s a less important activity and not worthy of your attention, if the relationship is important to you, and the cause you are working for is important to you, then the task must be important to you.
“Well,” you say, “my boss won’t support me.” Then your creative task is to build your boss’s confidence in you so that, gradually, you are allowed to do a little more creative work. If your efforts pay dividends, you will inevitably find yourself free to do more.
BALANCE CREATIVE COURAGE WITH CONSIDERATION FOR OTHERS. Even if you work in a political milieu, if you show the courage of your convictions, you will have a greater degree of freedom than you previously thought possible. Goethe said it most aptly, “Boldness has genius and magic in it.” With courage, you can often carry the day. Unless you are bold with others, either you won’t get their attention, or they won’t sense the depth of your drive and commitment, so you stay at their mediocre level of expectation.
You’ve got to be proactive and take initiative. At the same time, I define maturity as “courage balanced with consideration.” This definition wonderfully applies to creativity as well. If you have both courage and consideration, you will be creative. In his book Motivation and Personality, Abraham Maslow teaches that the self-actualizing person brings courage and creativity together.
OPERATE IN BOTH A HIGHLY INDEPENDENT MODE AND A HIGHLY INTERDEPENDENT MODE. At the core of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People lies the Maturity Continuum, a developmental path moving from dependence to independence to interdependence. This same continuum also applies to creativity. Those creative talents who stop at independence are usually those who burn out early. They’re shooting stars. They don’t have endurance because they don’t build an interdependent team around themselves.
I find that highly creative work is too difficult to endure the market forces unless we have an interdependent mindset and skillset. With no backup, no relief, no synergy, our strengths become our undoing; our weakness becomes evident because it is not being covered by the strengths of others.
Build a team around yourself of people who can compensate for your weaknesses and let you do what you do best. Peter Drucker once stated, “Build on strengths; organize to make weaknesses irrelevant.”
GET OUT OF THE BOX, PUT ON DIFFERENT HATS, AND ENGAGE IN LATERAL THINKING. You may need to follow the advice of Edward de Bono in his classic book Six Thinking Hats: “Unscramble your thinking so that you can use one thinking mode at a time—instead of trying to do everything at once.” Try thinking creatively without thinking critically. Think logically without thinking optimistically, and so forth. His lateral thinking involves escaping from the usual patterns of thought to new patterns in order to generate new ideas and break out of conceptual prisons. Peter Ueberroth, organizer of the highly successful Los Angeles Olympics, once said it was lateral thinking that turned the games from an event no city wanted to an event for which cities now compete vigorously.
As you look back on your life, you may realize that the things that mattered most were too often at the mercy of things that mattered least, that the good was the enemy of the best, that you were terrorized by the tyranny of urgency, and that you enjoyed very little creative freedom.
I suggest that you start a cycle of growth and progression: a weekly cycle centered on creative activities such as reflection, planning, commitment, preparation, prevention, and relationship enhancement.
By working with my son, Joshua, in his role as quarterback of his high-school football team, I learned once again how important it is to have a creative orientation, as opposed to a problem-solving orientation. When you are problem solving, you are trying to get rid of something. When you are in a creative mode, you are trying to bring something into being. You still have to solve problems, but you solve them with a different frame of mind, a different perspective, a larger context.
I told my son, “If you create the victory in your mind before the game, then focus your proactive energies around making that happen and stop worrying about a problem you may have, you are then in a better position to create a positive outcome.” As evidenced by his performance on the field, I think he learned that lesson. For example, if the weather was bad on game day, he learned to find ways to use the weather to his advantage. In effect, he learned to carry his own weather with him into the game and cause good things to happen, eventually leading his team to the state championship.
Why then do we educate people, especially in schools of management, in problem-solving paradigms but not creativity? I think that is one of the great flaws in our management-education programs—the emphasis on getting rid of a problem. But we perpetuate it because creativity is harder to measure. It opens up Pandora’s box. It’s seen as something outside the scope of serious academic programs.
So if we aren’t educated in the creative orientation, how can we acquire it—or rediscover it from our childhood? I think we have to exercise our creative imaginations. Einstein said imagination is greater than knowledge. He claimed that his remarkable scientific insights came through the power of his imagination.
The common thread in the best thinking on management and leadership is this: People both want and need to feel that their lives and work have meaning. For instance, if you are having difficulty in a relationship, instead of trying to solve the problem, meet with the person and come up with a common vision or purpose you can work on together. Look at what Gandhi did. He struggled with feelings of inferiority all his life, he was socially reticent, and he was fearful. But as soon as he got a sense of mission and vision about what he could do to overcome injustice, all of his weaknesses were subordinated and he dedicated his strengths to the service of his higher purpose. He became a tremendously creative person with enormous authority, power, and influence, even though he never held an official position.
One-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner said that the main reason many companies don’t progress is that they don’t know how to manage people who have a creative orientation and who work with imagination. I think that it’s because they define management as control, and you cannot control the creative mind. What you do is invite people to buy in to a common vision and purpose, then let them manage themselves.
Jack Welch, the legendary CEO of General Electric, used to say that his main job was to unleash the creative energy of people. It took him a long time, and some tough experiences, to learn that lesson.
Whenever I get into a problem-solving mentality, I start worrying. I start feeling anxious and stressed. I start thinking in analytical terms. In this mindset, my most important goals shrink from sight. To my dismay, the problem rarely goes away. But when I have a creative orientation and a strong sense of purpose shared with others who are most important to me, I find that problems seem to take care of themselves.
• What is the burning yes that governs your life right now? It might be a vital project, a relationship that needs attention, or a personal goal. What do you need to say no to in order to realize that priority? Write down how you will say no, then do it.
• We can’t deal with people as if we’re dealing with things. Write in your journal: Have you been treated as a thing? How did that make you feel? How would you describe that relationship? When have you treated others as things instead of people? How did it affect the relationship?
• Important but not urgent activities are easily pushed out by daily planning, because the day is a very short horizon for substantive work. By contrast, weekly planning affords you a longer-term perspective, making it easier to act within the context of your mission, roles, and goals. If you haven’t started planning your weeks, set aside time at the beginning of next week to plan how will you take care of your most important priorities and put everything else in its proper perspective.