My Take on “Put First Things First”

It has been 3 months after the June Holiday since we read “the 7 habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey. I will attempt to share my reflection and also hear from my other colleague’s reflections on the habits written in the book – for me is on Habit 3: Put First Things First.

Learning how to Put First Things First addresses good time management which can be a real challenge for many people. Too often, our focus is on things and time, rather than on preserving and enhancing relationships and accomplishing results. So, Put First Things First also involves life management as well – knowing your purpose, values, roles and priorities. So, First things are things we, personally find most worth doing. Many of our activities are affected by two factors, namely urgency and importance. Most of us are driven by the concept of urgency and so urgency is our continuous focus. Such urgency usually falls into the category of “must be done” which may not be our highest priority, so this is Put Second Things First. But to really affect positive change in our lives, we need to reorganize the way we spend our time, to focus on the concept of importance – not urgency. And to live a more balanced existence of our lives, it is important to recognize that not doing everything that comes along is okay. There is no need to overextend ourselves. All it takes is realizing that it is all right – as cited in the book, pleasantly, smiling and non-apologetically say no when necessary and focus on the highest priorities.

So, what does that mean to me? Well, this reading urges me to understand myself better and become better at working out what relationships I should get into and what activities I should focus on. It prompted me to revisit my own purpose, values, roles and priorities. After much thought, I still stand by my decision that my family and my work are my two highest priorities and big things of my satisfied life. However, as I reflected on how I spend my time (say 2 weeks after the September holidays), I came to realize as shown below that I have not fully met my highest priorities. I am still reacting to urgent matters and managing one issue after another. 

Now that I know where I spend most of my time on a regular basis, next I considered where all these are taking me – the purpose. My purpose focused on two areas: Family and Work.

My life purpose spins around my family – I desire a sustainable deep, loving relationship with my family. As mentioned in last year’s reflection, to me, there is no conflict about work and family. In fact, I still find such constant juggling act in which parenting, teaching and leadership, in which each informs me of the other, and each also strengthens the other. I believe in this and was happy to see them confirmed this year when I wanted to play a part in my children’s learning journey and contributed by teaching them to think using methods that works well for them. But I feel that the challenge remains – for me to maintain this attitude that parenting, teaching and leadership complements each other as my roles and responsibilities grow.

My purpose at work as a middle manager is to ensure the learning of my students. And there is no better way to drive students’ learning than to develop the teachers who spend hours educating them every day. Hence, my role as a people developer is important – I am responsible to take holistic care of and to grow and develop my teachers (I will illustrate what I mean by growing and developing of my teachers in my later reflection). Last December’s reflection on the people developer – on the need to establish genuine relationship with teachers and setting of high expectations on the teaching and learning aspects of teachers remains relevant. However, my attempt with data-driven instructions as a cohort dean remains skeptical to teachers. “Just teaching to the test?” My belief remains unchanged, is that data-driven instructions provide information about how we teachers teach, assess and reteach. Such information will help teachers to rethink some of the ineffective teaching and implement new teaching. But this data-driven program I know I needed to give up this year as the teachers are not yet ready for its implementation. Instead, I will attempt to pursue the enhancement of teacher development next year by building on the observation and feedback cycle.

As I balance the Big Things in my life purpose and purpose at work, the reading also reminded me not to become overwhelmed, to start with some of the small changes instead of trying to take on everything at once. In this way, by taking up the responsibility guided by my purpose and values, I now will move forward and live by them!