How it all started

When I read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People for the first time, I stumbled upon the calendar, described in Habit 3 (“Put First Things First”), I thought at first, I could make a photocopy of displayed calendar in the book. My second thought was: I might be able to create a spreadsheet in Excel, just a static one, and change the dates each week.

I am web applet developer, and I know how Excel works, so I thought, I might be able to create a much finer Excel sheet. To save me some time, I Googled to find out if somebody has done something similar, and guess what: there was! No need to reinvent the wheel. Unfortunately, I don’t remember where I found the spreadsheet – so: unknown author, thank you!

After a few weeks, I discovered an error: each month had 31 days. After September 30th 2014, I had a day called September 31st. I found a very simple workaround: just override the formula and write “1” in the field which currently has value 31. And change 2 into 1, and so forth. Problem solved for the time being.

The spreadsheet consisted of five pages. I decided to remove the pages for next week and the week after that, because I found three week planning is colliding with Dr. Coveys “one day at a time”. I also removed the first tab, that only contained some information about the origins of the calendar.

The last sheet only contained some graphics, used on the other pages. I decided to get rid of the graphics, and use “text-only” formulas. So I reduced the 5 tabbed sheet to two sheets. That worked fine.

In the meanwhile, I tried to find out if there was some online system to create a Covey Calendar. And I didn’t find anything. Well, there are some sites that achieve the same purpose, but they do not result in the one sheet calendar as Dr. Covey described. And that is where I started to think about Kairosplanner.com.

The name I found was very easy. In Coveys book “First Things First” (and perhaps also in The 7 Habits?), he describes the difference between the Greek words Kronos and Kairos. Kairos means “importance” while Kronos means “Time”. As Dr. Covey says: “Do not prioritize your schedule, but schedule your priorities”. To put that in other words: make a Kairos Plan, not a Kronos Plan. Unfortunately, I waited too long to buy the domain name KairosPlan.com. Bad luck. But I got KairosPlanner.com.

So that is the story behind KairosPlanner.com. I don’t know anything yet about the legal rules, copyright and so on, but well, in first case I am not making KairosPlanner for other people than myself. Sure, I will make it possible to log on with your own mail address. But first I will finish programming on KairosPlanner.com, then I will try to discuss the possibilities with the company that has copyright on The 7 Habits, FranklinCovey Inc.

On the next pages, you can follow my journey in this project. I hope. If I find it necessary to write. Most texts will be boring, technical and nerdish. But hey, I am a nerd. 🙂 But I will try to make it fun too. And interesting.

Best regards,

Albert van Harten
Founder KairosPlanner.com