The entire premise of the bestseller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey, is that most people deal with the problems in their life in a scattershot fashion, and this leads to disillusionment and disorder.   Covey's answer to this is that to be a truly effective person, you need to learn to solve personal and professional problems with a integrated and principle-centered approach - in other words, the decisions you make both personally and professionally should come from the same core set of values and ideas.  Once you develop that core set of values, it's easy to draw solutions to problems from them, making you a much more effective person in all aspects of life.  

Habit 1:  Be Proactive - Principles of Personal Vision

In everyone's life, there are a multitude of events that occur every day.  Within that set of events there is a smaller set that you actually can do anything about, your sphere of influence, so to speak.  Now, where is your focus?  Is it on those events that you can do something about, or on the ones that are out of your control?

The idea is don't spend your time focusing on events that you can't control; instead, focus on what you can control.  Let's say, for example, that you're waiting for a very important phone call.  Some people stress out waiting for the call - that's a bad habit because you can't control when the phone call comes.   On the other hand, others simply spend their time focusing on the things they can control - the phone call will eventually come, right?  How can you achieve that?  Spend a day counting the number of times you spend focusing on the things you can't alter the outcome of.  Do you daydream about unachievable things?  Do you worry about things you can't affect?  Cast those efforts aside and spend your time on things that you can affect.

Habit 2:  Begin With The End In Mind - Principles of Personal Leadership

This chapter starts out literally at the end: imagine your funeral and what others there are saying and thinking about you.  What do you want them to say?  The things that you want them to say are the real core values that you care about the most, and thus they should be the ones that you focus your life's work on, both personally and professionally.  The chapter goes through several exercises for teasing out the meaning, but it all comes back to that funeral scene.  What will your family say at your funeral?   What will your coworkers say?  What about your friends?  What about people in the community?  What do you want them to say about you?  That's your mission.

Habit 3:  Put First Things First - Principles of Personal Management

Most things that we do each day can be divided up in two different ways:  they're either urgent or not urgent, and they're either important or not important.   Obviously, in our lives, we wish for the things we do to be important, but we'd also like for them not to be urgent, because urgent things cause stress.  So, ideally, an effective person focuses on things that are important but not urgent.  Covey goes a long way with this central idea here, pointing out that we should strive to do this in all aspects of our life, no matter which hat we're wearing at the moment: worker, parent, spouse/partner, volunteer, and so on.  Then, within each of those roles, one should define specific goals that they wish to accomplish.  Once you've defined a couple of goals for the upcoming week for each of your roles, literally schedule them in.  Add these things to your schedule and don't let anything interfere with them.  Because these items are not urgent, you have some flexibility on when to do them, but because they're important, you must schedule them and honor your commitment to them.   

Habit 4:  Think Win/Win - Principles of Interpersonal Leadership

This chapter offers a fundamental way to see all interpersonal relationships.  Is there a way where you both can come out ahead at the end of an interaction?  If there is, that's usually the best road to take, and that's a "win/win."  One of the exercises from this chapter, is to think about a relationship in your life that wasn't in a "win/win" state.  Then, write down every notable aspect of the situation from your perspective, and try to do the same from the other's perspective.  Doing this can bring you closer to seeing a win/win solution.

Habit 5:  Seek First To Understand, Then Be Understood - Principles of Empathic Communication

An effective communicator really tries to understand as much information as possible about the situation before providing a solution.  Covey offers a great example of this in the middle part of the chapter, when he outlines a discussion with a teenage boy that goes terribly. The problem is that they're speaking to two completely different things: the boy is having difficulty expressing his problem, while the parent is already trying to guess at the solution.  What can be learned?   Don't focus on solutions until the full story is told.  If someone comes to you with a situation, hear them out.  Often it requires the full story and some questions before the correct plan of action is revealed. This means listening and attempting to see the situation from the speaker's perspective, not just your own.

Habit 6:  Synergize - Principles of Creative Cooperation

This chapter is about dealing with people that are difficult and turning that into something beneficial.  The real key to doing it is to identify what exactly about that person makes them beneficial, and also the specific traits about them that cause you not to like them. Once those are clear, how can those traits be used all together, perhaps along with your own, to make the situation better?

Habit 7:  Sharpen the Saw - Principles of Balanced Self-Renewal

This final habit focuses on the need to do things that renew you in several different ways: physical, mental, spiritual, and social/emotional.  Quite often, we get so caught up in the day-in and day-out business of life that we rarely step back and spend any time focusing on taking care of ourselves.  Covey ties this in with the third habit and encourages the reader to identify ways to really renew oneself in each of those areas, then literally schedule it in and stick to it, because it's important but not necessarily urgent.   For example, if you're feeling mentally drained, schedule time to relax and let your mind float onto something outside of your normal thoughts (like a book or a movie) or meditate.