The Franklin Covey Monticello

The Stephen Covey Worksheet Personal Organizer

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The Franklin Covey Monticello is a day planner or personal organizer originated by Stephen Covey.

On this page I'm going to describe what's special about the Monticello organizer, and how it relates to Covey's Seven Habits.

My copy of the Seven Habits book was printed in 1994, so the page numbers are probably different from yours. However, I'll give my page numbers to give you a rough idea of where to find this stuff in the book.

The third habit is 'put first things first', 'first things' meaning the most important tasks. In other words, make sure you plan your most important tasks into your week before you add lesser items to your schedule.

Stephen Covey's advice on long term planning (page 168) is, first create your overall life mission statement, second define the key roles in your life, and third set your goals for each role. For example, roles might be parent, employee and spouse.

You then need to link this long term plan into your daily life. Stephen Covey suggests that it's best to organize on a weekly basis. The reason is that over the course of a week you have a better chance of balancing your various roles, whereas a single day is too short.

This made sense to me. So the first point I liked about the Covey worksheet was the suggestion to work with a 'week to a view' day planner. (In fact the Franklin Covey Monticello is now available in week to a view or a page per day).

Covey's advice on weekly organizing (page 168) was to consider each role, and then set a mini-goal for the week for each role to take you towards achieving your long term goals. On his sample day planner worksheet (pages 166-167), there is room on the page to note the roles and mini-goals and then to schedule time for each mini-goal.

In the actual Covey personal organizer you were given a plastic bookmark to mark the current week and you were given special weekly roles and goals 'rulers' that fitted into the plastic bookmark. The same system is used now in the Franklin Covey Monticello.

As far as I know, this is the only personal organizer system with this weekly roles and goals bookmark system.

In fact, I would write my appointment on the monthly page, and only transfer to the weekly pages at the start of each week.

Again this system is used in the Monticello.

By the way, if you decide to vist the Franklin Covey web site it's easy to be bamboozled by the huge variety of different day planners available.

Most of them having nothing to do with Stephen Covey's weekly worksheet. But if you follow this link to the Monticello (Opens a new window on your browser so it's easy to find your way back here)

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