Design & Lead Your Life Effectively.

Whether you’re a director, a manager, or a user researcher (like me), or even as a parent, a partner or a friend, you’re the designer and leader of your own life. How can you do that effectively? That question has been answered in 1989, in the book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” when it was first published. Today, it is branded a timeless bestseller written by Stephen Covey, explaining what habits everyone should incorporate in their life to be — as the title states — highly effective.

We tend to believe that physical liberation precedes the psychological one. The experiences and discoveries of Victor Frankl on the meaning of life while being captured in a Nazi camp proves the opposite by showing that private victories precede public victories. And that’s exactly how anyone can become highly effective: by taking an inside-out approach. Start with yourself, become independent and then focus on nurturing interdependency. That sounds easy, right? Covey explains in the book how you can become independent and achieve private victories by internalising habits 1,2,3 and achieving public victories by applying habits 4,5,6. Habit 7 then is the one that polishes the other habits.

Habit 1 — Be proactive

There are times that things do not go the way you expect or have planned. You get an external stimulus and it’s up to you how you respond. By being proactive, you’re showing that you’re responsible or able to respond. Instead of focusing on the problems and reacting on them as they occur, you try to understand what action you can take: act instead of being acted upon. You can choose your own response. Changing the language you use will help to shift your paradigm, for example from: “if only” to “I will”. When I first got interested in UX Design, I was thinking by myself “if only I had a design background”, my desire triumphed and I took classes to understand design principles and to work on projects to apply what I’ve learned and bring perspectives from my Economics background.

Habit 2 — Begin with the end in mind

Do you have a personal mission statement? If the answer is no, create one! Your personal mission statement gives meaning to your life and is a nice handle to get you on your feet when you’re stuck. What do you want to be, and what do you want to do with your life? Needless to say, it takes some time to get to your inner values to write your mission statement. It is a work in progress piece of document that you should review from time to time. I never had the end in mind, I was focused on short-term achievements, because these are easy to assess. My personal mission statement, even though poorly drafted, is giving me a sense of direction.

Habit 3 — Put first things first

We all have different roles in life, and in a fast-moving life we lose our focus. We tend to work on the urgent stuff as they come our way, and don’t have time for the stuff that will actually help us grow, develop ourselves (Quadrant 2 activities), and also tend to neglect our duties towards important people in our lives. Tackling this problem, means personal management: planning and prioritising.

Based on Covey’s weekly planner, I made a template in Notion that I have incorporated in my life and which you can use as well. (Make sure to duplicate the page).

Habit 4 — Think win-win

This one reminds me of the Prisoner’s Dilemma: if both cooperate, both will be better off. Within teams, between departments, in your personal life, wherever you have clashing interests, do not focus on your own win and the loss of the other. Bitter resentment and loss will follow you in the long term and supersede the short term win. Think in the long term and cooperate, that’s the message.

Habit 5 — Seek to understand then to be understood

Empathy is an important skill and most people believe that they are empathic. As a user researcher I also have to use my empathic skills to understand the users, what they need, what they want. I have to admit that it isn’t easy not to fall into probing, evaluating, giving advice and interpreting. We all have our own pair of glasses that we use to make sense of the world, and as long as we don’t take them off and try to wear the glasses of others, we will not understand them. Rather than preparing a reply, listen and ask questions to truly understand the other person.

Habit 6 — Synergise

How lovely it is when you build up on each others’ ideas. Understanding each other and trying to find an alternative that creates even more value: 1+1>2
Coming from different backgrounds, having different perspectives opens new possibilities. A few weeks ago, I participated in a Hackathon and together with five others coming from different spheres of life, we had fruitful discussions and multiple ideas on how to tackle the issue at hand. No, we didn’t win the Hackathon, and yet it was a nice synergistic exercise. It was acknowledged by the challenge owner, as we were invited to work further on the ideas.

Habit 7 — Sharpen the saw

As Covey also explains, putting the 7 habits into practice is a continuous process. You will never be done with it and you will need to have the endurance and integrity to follow up. That’s why, habit 7 works on all the habits by focusing daily on four key areas: mental, spiritual, physical, social/emotional.

So next time, if someone asks you what event that happened in 1989 changed and continues to change lives to this day, you have another answer to give than the fall of the Berlin Wall :)