FIRST THINGS FIRST - Stephen Covey Recently while I was surfing on the internet looking for a new book to read, I found a proposal that got my attention. I've always loved literature about business management and in this case the book was supposed to deal with the way we prioritize things in life and job in these days. It was entitled “First thing first”, form Stephen Covey. It's very difficult to sum up the main ideas of such a complex book, but I'm going to try to give a general outline of the main concepts. In first place, the author explains how we have been working in the past about prioritizing tasks. So in the beginning we were just worried about keeping the track of things by means of to do list We spent a big part of our time writing down lists in order to remember what we had to do and when. After that, in a second step, schedules and plannification turned out to be the most important things in management. Everyday we had several appoinments and dead lines that we were commited to accomplish. In a further stage, once we had become more efficient in distributing our time, we realized that it was necessary to place values and weigh pros and cons when chosing how to spend our time, fixing long, medium and short range goals. It could be said that main things turned out to be prioritizing and control. At this point the author stands out that after these different stages, we are getting more things done in les time, but there is still a gap between what is deeply important and what we spend our time on. We usually make the mistake of doing urgent things in first place that are not important, becouse there's a dead line we have to accomplish, procrastinating and being overwhelmed by appoinments and schedules. That's why he comes up with the idea that to succeed in management (of business and life) we should put in first place those basic needs that are the basement for human fullfillment and not falling in doing urgent or non important things that can be dealt later. The main idea is that we all have a mission in life that gives us the guidelines to succes in every field of life. There are several examples in the book of people who didn't drive their lives, becouse they followed their parents or bosses expectations or becouse they were conditionned by the social mirror. They couldn't hear their inner voice to find out which was their mission in life and try to accomplish it. So these people won't be able to reach happiness, although they could apparently seem to have a comfortable li