%A Covey, Stephen R.; Merrill, A. Roger; Merrill, Rebecca R. %T First Things First %I Simon & Schuster %C New York %D1994 %G ISBN 0-671-86441-6 %P 362 pp. %O hardcover, U.S. $23.00 I found this a valuable and thought-provoking book. As with Covey's previous bestseller, THE 7 HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE, I turned to it at a moment in my life when I was feeling stressed by many competing demands upon my time; and, as was the case with 7 HABITS, this book helped. It is a useful pedagogical device. That, in fact, is an excellent way to characterize FIRST THINGS FIRST. It is more a device than a book. Do not expect to read it in the same "fun" sense that you would read a novel or a learned essay, where you can read for several hours, absorb insights, think "gee, that was good," and move on. In order to benefit from this book, you have to take it on its own terms. You have to engage yourself with it just as you would with a chemistry textbook or the documentation manual for a new piece of computer software. Indeed, the experience of reading FIRST THINGS FIRST is quite a bit like reading an introductory textbook for a good seven-week summer course. Covey makes a handful of very intriguing citations in each chapter. But I would have liked more footnotes, a deeper bibliography, and a more sustained analysis. (A caveat about "prerequisites": this book presupposes a fairly high level of mental health in the reader. It is aimed more towards the reader who is able to consciously direct his energies towards improving his quality of life.) While there are a number of well written vignettes and interesting insights, there is also a somewhat numbing repetition of specialized Coveyese jargon. That, I am sure, is the authors' deliberate choice, based on their years of experience in teaching (and marketing) these techniques. Their objective is to get their system of thought across to a diverse audience in a way that communicates their message with maximum clarity and coherence. Unfortunately, to do this, they pay a price in the aesthetic quality of the book's composition; but they succeed in making the book--what else--"effective" in achieving its own purposes. The three elements of this book that I found most valuable were: First, its emphasis on time management as a consequence of reflective thinking about quality of life, and, in Covey's words, "living, loving, learning, and leaving a legacy". One nice quote: "When we talk about time management, it seems ridiculous to worry about speed before direction, about saving minutes when we may be wasting years." Second, Covey's belief in the importance of one's vision of the future. Chapter Five, "The Passion of Vision", and Appendix A, "The Mission Statement Workshop," are worth the price of the book by themselves. Third, Chapter 9's discussion of "Integrity in the Moment of Choice", and Covey's suggestion that we formulate a question to ask ourselves in that moment of choice. "Who am I?" "What is the right thing to do here?" "What is life asking of me right now?" Covey wisely suggests that each of us must formulate this question in our own language. Overall assessment: this book is a good starting point for tackling middle-of-the-road quality of life problems. It will be a permanent and valued part of my personal library. --Frederick Zimmerman Previous IBIC Reviews, as well as links to many other Internet information resources related to books, are available via the Internet Book Information Center WWW serverspace (provided courtesy of SunSITE, a joint project of the University North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Sun Microsystems). The URL is http://sunsite.unc.edu/ibic/IBIC-homepage.html. Selected text resources are available by anonymous ftp to sunsite.unc.edu; directory is /pub/electronic-publications/ibic. The IBIC Gopher server is temporarily unavailable but a new one is under construction. E-mail comments encouraged to ibic@sunsite.unc.edu.