Roles: the hats you wear

Why this matters

Ask a man what he is. He'll usually answer with the role he's working in at that moment. "I'm an electrician." "I'm a dad." "I'm the lodge's Senior Warden." Each is true. None is the whole list. The trouble starts when the unnamed roles compete for the same hour and the man has no language for the tradeoff.

Covey and the First Things First authors found the same pattern across the executives they studied: the men who planned their week by role rather than by task complained less about being stretched thin, kept their commitments to family at higher rates, and reported less domestic friction. The mechanism is simple: when you can see all the hats at once, you stop overcommitting one of them.

What this chapter is

Every man wears more than one hat at once. Father, brother, son, husband, Mason, officer, neighbor, employer or employee. Without naming them, he plans for one and resents that the others suffer. Covey's habit 3 ("put first things first") gets traction once roles are explicit. Drucker's Managing Oneself makes the same point in a different vocabulary: a man is asked to know not just what he wants to do but who, in relation to whom, he's trying to be.