First Things First

Ultimately, saying No frees us from the trap of busyness and empowers us to spend our time on actions that truly matter, contributing to a more balanced and fulfilling life.

Interdependence creates win-win situations, fostering an environment where success is not achieved at the expense of others, but with them. This builds mutual respect, trust, and beneficial relationships.

Interdependence is about combining strengths and compensating weaknesses through cooperation and achieving common goals through shared efforts.

Principle-centered leadership involves qualities like integrity, trust, honesty, and ethical behavior. They form a robust foundation that fosters credibility, influence, and sustainable success.

Effective people spend more time on activities that are important but not urgent, leading to a more balanced, controlled, and purposeful life.

The truest sense of fulfillment comes from aligning time management with the compass, prioritizing the values and vision over merely chasing the clock.

Our lives can be viewed from two perspectives: clock and compass. The clock encompasses our schedules, tasks, appointments, and responsibilities—it's about managing time. The compass embodies our visions, values, morals, and missions—it's about managing direction .

More than doing things right, it’s focused on doing the right things.

It’s much more a matter of what you do and why you do it, than how fast you get it done.

Basing our happiness on our ability to control everything is futile. While we do control our choice of action, we cannot control the consequences of our choices.

Quality of life cannot be achieved by taking the right shortcut. There is no shortcut. But there is a path. The path is based on principles revered throughout history.

Self-awareness prompts us to start where we are—no illusions, no excuses—and helps us to set realistic goals.

Fundamental to putting first things first in our lives is leadership before management: 'Am I doing the right things?' before 'Am I doing things right?'

Anything less than a conscious commitment to the important is an unconscious commitment to the unimportant.

Knowing and doing what’s important rather than simply responding to what’s urgent is foundational to putting first things first.

The value of the matrix is that it helps us to see how importance and urgency affect the choices we make about how to spend our time.

The essence of these needs is captured in the phrase 'to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy.

Just as real as 'true north' in the physical world are the timeless laws of cause and effect that operate in the world of personal effectiveness and human interaction.

1. 'The power of principles is that they’re universal, timeless truths. If we understand and live our lives based on principles, we can quickly adapt; we can apply them anywhere.

3. 'Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

4. 'We’re not victims. We’re not the product of our past. We are the product of our choices. We are “response-able”—able to respond, to choose beyond our moods and tendencies.

5. 'Quality of life is inside-out. Meaning is in contribution, in living for something higher than self.

By making and keeping promises to ourselves and to others, little by little we increase our strength until our ability to act is more powerful than any of the forces that act upon us.

The best way to predict your future is to create it.

Our security comes from our own integrity to true north.

Doing more things faster is no substitute for doing the right things.

The key to quality of life is in the compass—it’s in the choices we make every day.

The key, however, is not to prioritize your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.

The object of Quadrant II organizing is not to set a schedule in cement. It’s to create the framework in which quality decisions based on importance can be made on a day-by-day, moment-by-moment basis.

Quadrant II organizing empowers you to look at the best use of your time through the paradigm of importance rather than urgency.

Vision is the best manifestation of creative imagination and the primary motivation of human action. It’s the ability to see beyond our present reality, to create, to invent what does not yet exist, to become what we not yet are.

The key to motivation is motive. It’s the why. It’s the deeper “yes!” burning inside that makes it easier to say no to the less important.

What is quality of life if it isn’t spending time with the people you love most?

A stewardship is a trust. A steward is 'one called to exercise responsible care over possessions entrusted to him or her.' We’re stewards over our time, our talents, our resources.

Balance is in living, loving, learning, and leaving a legacy, and our roles create the synergistic, sometimes seasonal avenues through which we do it.

Every role has a relationship with family members, work associates, relatives, or friends. To see this vital social dimension empowers us to put people ahead of schedules.

There’s no balance in life without balance in our inner life—without the synergy created when living, loving, learning, and leaving a legacy coalesce.

Goals that are connected to our inner life have the power of passion and principle. They’re fueled by the fire within and based on “true north” principles that create quality-of-life results.

The key to motivation is motive. It’s the “why.” It’s what gives us the energy to stay strong in hard moments.

If a goal isn’t connected to a deep “why,” it may be good, but it usually isn’t best.

Doing the right thing for the right reason in the right way is the key to quality of life, and that can only come through the power of an educated conscience that aligns us with vision, mission, and true north.

Self-awareness involves deep personal honesty. It comes from asking and answering hard questions.

To have the self-awareness to know the difference between the good and the best and to act based on mission, conscience, and principles is to make the most significant deposits in our Personal Integrity Account.

To set and work toward any goal is an act of courage. When we exercise the courage to set and act on goals that are connected to principles and conscience, we tend to achieve positive results.

Quadrant II organizing is not prioritizing what’s on the schedule; it’s scheduling priorities.

The successful experiences most of us would like to have in life are rarely an accident. They are almost always an achievement, the result of careful planning and thorough preparation.

Quality of life depends on what happens in the space between stimulus and response.

A moment of choice is a moment of truth. It’s the testing point of our character and competence.

We may find it convenient to live with the illusion that circumstances or other people are responsible for the quality of our lives, but the reality is that we are responsible—responsible—for our choices.

The essence of principle-centered living is making the commitment to listen to and live by conscience.

Over time, our choices become habits of the heart. And, more than any other factor, these habits of the heart affect our time and the quality of our lives.

We exhaust ourselves far more from the tension and the consequences of internal disharmony—not doing what we feel we should— than from hard, unremitting work.

The key to acting with integrity is to simply stop playing the game. Learn to listen—as well as to conscience, to our own response.

It takes courage to be self-honest, to examine your deepest motives, and to let go of the excuses and rationalizations that keep you from living true to your best self.

One of the best ways to educate our heart is to look at our interaction with other people, because our relationships with others are fundamentally a reflection of our relationship with ourselves.

Our accomplishments are interdependent. Although we look back in history and tend to say that one particular person “invented” or “discovered” a particular thing, the reality is that most great achievements were not made in a vacuum.

The fact is that we’re better together than we are alone. Humility comes as we realize that “no man is an island,” that no one individual has all the talents, all the ideas, all the capacity to perform the functions of the whole.

Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships—marriages, families, and organizations of every kind— together.

The fourth-generation paradigm is people first, things second. It’s leadership first, management second. It’s effectiveness first, efficiency second. It’s purpose first, structure second. It’s vision first, method second.

Only by drawing on the combined brain power of all its employees can a firm face up to the turbulence and constraints of today’s environment.

Control is such an illusion. People who are into control have basically internalized sufficient principles or natural laws of life so that they think they are the ones making things happen.

Because we know how to listen to our own heart, we can listen to the hearts of others. We can step out of our autobiography and seek to understand.

This is the essence of win-win: in almost all situations, cooperation is far more productive than competition.

The degree to which urgency drives the organization is the degree to which importance does not.

The passion created by shared vision creates synergistic empowerment. It unleashes and combines the energy, talent, and capacities of all involved.

Shared vision becomes the constitution, the criterion for decision making in the group. It bonds people together. It gives them a sense of unity and purpose that provides great strength in times of challenge.

A powerful shared vision has a profound effect on quality of life—in the family, in the organization, in any situation where we work with others. We become contributing parts of a greater whole.

The key to effective interdependent effort is what we call 'win-win stewardship agreements.' These agreements represent the critical juncture of people and possibilities.

Frustration is essentially a function of expectation. Clarifying interdependent expectations up front does a great deal to contribute to quality of life.

The point is that you’re working together on the problem instead of against each other through the problem.

When people really think win-win, when they seek to deeply understand each other, and they focus their energy toward solving problems synergistically instead of against each other, the effects are profound.

Win-win is not adversarial; it’s synergistic. It’s not transactional; it’s transformational.

Anytime we think the problem is 'out there,' that thought is the problem. We disempower ourselves.

Principle-centered leadership is the personal empowerment that creates empowerment in the organization.

Empowerment can’t be installed; it has to be grown. It’s a matter of nurturing the conditions that create it.

At the heart of empowerment is trustworthiness—which is a function of character and competence.

Character and competence are high-leverage areas of focus that make each of the other conditions possible.

Building character and competency is a process, and one of the highest-leverage things we can do in this process is to regularly seek 360 degree feedback.

The key is to consistently do whatever builds your strength in these areas and increases your capacity to live, to love, to learn, and to leave a legacy.

Genuine guilt (not social, scripted guilt) becomes our teacher, our friend. Like a homing device that signals when an airplane gets off course, it warns us when our lives are out of alignment with the true north principles that create quality of life.