The first of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is “be proactive,” and it’s usually read as advice to plan ahead.
Planning ahead is part of it. The part underneath is more useful.
What Covey actually meant
His argument was about the gap between what happens to you and how you respond.
Reactive people treat that gap as though it doesn’t exist — something occurs, and the response follows automatically. Proactive people notice the gap and choose what goes in it.
He paired that with a distinction worth carrying around: your circle of concern is everything you worry about, and your circle of influence is the smaller set of things you can actually affect. Reactive attention pours into the first. Proactive attention concentrates on the second — and, in his account, the circle of influence tends to grow as a result.
That’s a considerably more interesting idea than getting organised, and it explains why some people seem unhurried while handling more than everyone around them.
The ordinary version
Most of what happens is not actually a surprise.
The mortgage is due on the first of the month. Christmas is on the 25th of December. I know both of these, so the mortgage is a recurring payment and Christmas planning starts in June.
With four children, a full-time job and three Girl Scout troops, things I haven’t handled in advance turn into a frantic dash at the worst possible moment. So I know exactly what has to happen each year — the family portrait, the letter, the cards, the calendar for our former au pairs, and gifts for a very long list — and I set small deadlines against each. Portrait by mid-October. Calendars by the first of November.
None of it is large on its own. Addressing cards can be done in fifteen-minute pieces. Left until December, only a fraction would happen, and badly.
The result is that Christmas is genuinely enjoyable rather than something survived.
The business version
The same logic applies at work and almost nobody uses it, because businesses are very good at treating predictable things as emergencies.
Sit down once and list what you already know is coming:
- Your busy and quiet seasons. You know when they are. Hiring, stock and cash planning should sit ahead of them, not during.
- Renewals and contract dates. Insurance, software, leases, client agreements. Every one of these arrives on a known date and most get handled the week they expire, which is precisely when you have no negotiating position.
- Tax and filing deadlines. Fixed, published, and somehow still a crisis.
- Staff leave and cover. School holidays are on a calendar. So is Christmas.
- The invoice that’s always late. If a particular client pays slowly every quarter, that isn’t a surprise, it’s a pattern you can plan cash around.
Put each on the calendar with a reminder set well before it matters. That single exercise converts a meaningful share of next year’s emergencies into ordinary scheduled work.
Which is the connection to something I’ve written about elsewhere: a great deal of what feels urgent was entirely predictable. Urgency is frequently just a deadline you declined to look at earlier.
Where the harder version applies
Covey’s actual point — choosing your response rather than reacting — shows up most when something goes genuinely wrong.
A client leaves. A key person resigns. A supplier fails at the worst moment. You cannot plan those onto a calendar.
What you can do is notice the gap. The reactive response is immediate: the defensive email, the panicked decision, the reorganisation announced before anyone has thought. The proactive one takes a day, works out what’s actually within your control, and acts on that rather than on everything that’s worrying.
Same principle as the Christmas cards, applied where it matters considerably more.
Where to start
Take one recurring emergency — something that goes wrong at roughly the same point every year — and work backwards from it. What would have to happen, and when, for it not to be a crisis this time?
Then put those dates in the calendar and forget about it until they arrive.
It’s not a dramatic technique. It just removes one thing permanently from the list of things that ruin a month.
How are you proactive in your business? Tell me below.
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
