The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Essay Example

New York Times paperback best-seller list for more than four years, Stephen R. Covey's book came recommended by a number of leading names in business and academia. Appropriately sub-titled "powerful lessons in personal change" the book is replete with diagrams, charts, continuum bars, descriptive anecdotes, and numerous examples used by the author to effectively deliver his message.

Perhaps the most frequently discussed portion of Covey's book is Covey's practical yet profound recommendation regarding time management. Covey promotes weekly planning sessions to line up projects according to how well they fit your core values and goals. He advocates allocating the bulk of your time to tasks you identify as "important" (not to be confused with merely "urgent") by virtue of being closest to your core values and goals. Ideally tasks that you identify as less important will occupy little or none of your time because you will streamline, delegate or drop them altogether.I believe that this discussion is very important and very timely since most of us live in a very fast-paced world where 24 hours is not quite enough to finish all the tasks assigned to us.

Another remarkable thing about this book is the fact that the author does not claim to have invented the 7 habits he enumerates in this book. Rather, what Covey does is to discover what habits effective people have and finding a way to convey these into the basic principles of effectiveness.Needless to say, the simplicity of the points taken up by Covey is striking. These habits are a simple set of rules for life - inter-related and synergistic, and yet each one powerful and worthy of adopting and following

in its own right. For many people, reading Covey's work, or listening to him speak, literally changes their lives.

I can say that I am definitely one of those people whose lives have significantly turned for the better after reading and digesting the contents of Covey’s work.