Book Review: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

This book was a highly recommended to me by someone very close to me. Evidently she had determined that I was not at that time living my life very effectively.It's difficult to admit, but she was right. Therefore I embarked on a journey through this book with an open mind and an eagerness to learn absorb anything I possible could from this book. I managed to plow through it in an a day or too.The primary reason for that is that most of the book is filler. While the basic concepts are sound, the author spends a gratuitous amount of time hammering the point home. He accomplishes this mainly by sharing stories from her personal life in which he applied the principles to obtain positive results. Some of these stories, such as one in which he relates teaching his young son about responsibility are endearing and entertaining to read. While others, quite frankly, make the author seem impossibly arrogant.A strong focus of the book is on time management, but I can't say I agree with t
he authors thoughts on this matter. He present and impractically (and needlessly) complex version of a day-planner, and it is this writers opinion that his justification for why it is superior to any other standard day planner are flimsy at best. Further to that, despite the book having been supposedly revised and updated, this information is horribly out of date in the days of Google calender and the ilk.On thing I really did like, however, is the authors use of the "time management matix." The matrix is a group of four quadrants which are: important and urgent, important but not urgent, unimportant and urgent, and unimportant and not urgent.Covey argues that we has humans have great difficult doing anything that is important unless it is also urgent, while at the same time we excel at doing things that are not important and not urgent. An example of the former category would be meetings, deadlines, etc., while examples of the latter are playing games or watching TV.Consequ
ently, he argues, important but non- urgent activities go by the wayside, such as personal planning and development, relationships, etc.He has a point, but I don't necessarily agree with his assessment of what activities are time wasters. I think the purpose of life is to enjoy it, and the only truly wasted time is time spent doing things we don't want to do and don't enjoy. Sadly we don't live in a perfect world and out survival depends on us wasting at least some of our time on this earth.I was also put off with the author's pushing of Christianity throughout the book. The book itself is not sold in the religion section, and it seemed off and unnecessary for the author to share his religion at all. It just wasn't relevant.Overall I wouldn't go so far as to *not* recommend this book. I can see a lot of people benefiting from it. For me, however, it was derivative, and in the end, kind of boring.

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