.KEYWORD covey
.FLYINGHEAD WORKSHOP REVIEW
.TITLE Franklin Covey knows what matters most
.OTHER
.SUMMARY If you bought a Palm device because you were looking for a personal organizer but still found organizing your life to be difficult, then Franklin Covey may have just what you need. The personal and organizational effectiveness firm has produced a software package that integrates with your Palm device and is currently offering a workshop to help train you in its use. Steve Niles reviews the workshop and the software designed to guide you down the path of self-actualization.
.AUTHOR Steve Niles
Before the duplicitous, frequently nude Richard on the CBS hit show Survivor gave corporate trainers a bad name, Dr. Stephen R. Covey was improving people’s lives and dominating the bestseller list with his self-help tome, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey is also the founder and chairman of Franklin Covey Company, a 4,500 member international firm with the goal of becoming the premier personal and organizational effectiveness firm in the world.
Towards those ends, the company offers a wide range of live training workshops for individuals, families, businesses, government, nonprofit, and educational organizations. The workshops cover a variety of topics, such as project management, leadership roles, and writing and presentational skills.
Recently, I had a chance to attend a Franklin Covey workshop called What Matters Most for Palm Computing Organizers, pictured in Figure A, led by time management specialist, Monty Horton.
.FIG A Monty Horton conducted the interactive workshop, What Matters Most for Palm Computing Organizers.
.H1 Three steps to personal success
The one-day seminar introduces you to the company’s time and life management program, but primarily it focuses on how to use Franklin Covey’s software package, the Franklin Planner, in conjunction with your Palm device. The Franklin Planner is filled with features designed to help you self-actualize by organizing your life around your true priorities, as opposed to the priorities of others.
The way most people check their email messages is a good example, pointed out at the workshop, of what this means. Most of us check our email as soon as we get into work in the morning. This immediately inundates us with the concerns and demands of others. If you’re like most people, you’ll then go ahead and start responding to your email. You put off your own urgent matters to respond to the priorities of others. Also, how many times a day do you check your email? Do you look at it every time you get a spare moment, then plunge into dealing with other people’s priorities again if there are more messages in your box? Maybe limiting yourself to checking your email twice a day is enough.
The Franklin Covey approach puts the focus on you and your needs. This is done through a three-step process that will "create a compass that helps lead your life where you really want to go." Step one is Discover. During this phase, you discover what matters most to you by taking a look at what your governing values are. Step two is Plan, in which you use what you discovered in step one to form simple, effective plans. Step three is Act. In this phase, your daily activities are scheduled in alignment with what you established in the previous two steps.
The Franklin Planner software integrates with your Palm device to assist you in meeting the challenges of this process. Before you purchase it for yourself, however, you should note that the software is designed to be compatible with a Palm III or later version of the Palm organizer.
.CALLOUT If you make the commitment to use the Franklin Planner, you can no longer use your Palm desktop software.
Also, when installing the software onto your desktop, a warning is given that continuing the installation will overwrite your current Palm desktop application. When a coworker and I installed the software onto our computers, we both lost all of our Palm desktop records. Take the warning seriously before progressing with the installation. If you make the commitment to use the Franklin Planner, you won’t be able to use your Palm desktop software anymore, unless you HotSync on multiple machines and only keep the Franklin Planner software on one.
The best way to ensure pain-free installation of the Franklin Planner software is to perform a HotSync so that anything you’ve done in the Palm Desktop is saved into your device, and all records are up to date. Then, uninstall your Palm Desktop, install the Franklin Planner stuff, and HotSync again. Violate this procedure at the expense of a long tech support call.
If you synchronize your data at home and at work, but perhaps you share your home computer with another user who doesn’t want to use the Covey stuff, you can leave the Palm Desktop software running at home and have the Franklin Planner software running at work. You can safely synchronize your device with both. Franklin’s Daily Task List won’t show up on your home machine and Palm’s To Do List won’t show up at work, but all the data from your Date Book and your Address List will be complete in both places. Since the Franklin Planner’s Daily Task List is a little more useful to me than Palm’s To Do List (I’ll explain why later), I changed my Button Preferences, wiring the one that usually takes you to the built-in To Do List to the Task List, instead. My computer at work, the one that has the Franklin Planner software on it, has an up-to-date copy of my Task List on it.
There are nine key applications that you can download to your Palm device: Daily Task List, Master Task List, Daily Record of Events, Values, Roles, Mission, Goals, and Weekly Compass. I’ll give personal examples to illustrate how some of these applications are put to work.
.H1 Discover
During the discovery phase, the idea is to discover what matters most to you by considering your values, your roles, and your personal mission statement. The Franklin Planner desktop software includes various Wizards to help you with the process, as you can see in Figure B.
.FIGPAIR B The Wizards available on the Franklin Planner desktop help you define yourself.
The Franklin Planner desktop applications sync with their Palm device counterparts. This allows you to reflect on what you’ve learned about yourself later, during the planning phase of the process.
For example, in the Roles application, I was asked to list the various roles I play in life, such as husband, brother, writer, employee, etc. I then had to specify the key person I affect when I operate in that role. In order to clarify how I can really shine in that role, I then created a Tribute Statement, made up of the kinds of things I’d like that person to say about me. In Figure C you can see the Roles Palm application in use.
.FIG C I’m only beginning this process, so I set my expectations low.
To facilitate our discovery phase, those of us in attendance at the workshop were given a 3×5 card on which we were to complete the sentence, "If time and money were not a factor, I would
