The Efficient Office

Tracey Gritz, The Efficient Office

Despite the fact that I have significant business successes in my background and am a professional business efficiency consultant and office organizer, when I sat down to write my inaugural blog post, there was a little bit of fear holding me back.  I kept starting a sentence, deleting it, and coming back to the page with a brand new idea.  This cycle repeated itself until I finally got so frustrated that I took a deep breath and put my skills to work!

What finally helped me to kick off this blog post, and presumably will be the foundation for my future posts, was planning.  I stepped back, honed in on what I wanted to bring to my clients, and did some planning.

If this sounds familiar, it should.  This is one of the key points of “First Things First,” an acclaimed productivity book by Stephen R. Covey.  In this book, Mr. Covey points out that our frustrations and lack of productivity often come from the fact that we spend much of our time either fighting fires or addressing the interruptions in our lives.  If instead, we focus our attention on planning and preparation, we tend to have greater success and satisfaction in our efforts.

Coming back to the blogging example, it’s easy to see how Mr. Covey’s philosophy helped me to move forward with this one simple task.

1. First, I identified my own fires. I have clients and I MUST address their needs in a timely manner or my business will fail.  That self-imposed deadline gave me constant permission to put off the task of writing a blog post.
2. Second, I took a look at the interruptions that got in the way of my goal. I have a family, a business, and outside interests.  Together, these enabled far too many excuses for me to walk away from my blog.
3. Third, I planned! I decided:
   1. When I would blog (a specific schedule that I could commit to),
   2. Established a goal for my blog (to provide business owners with tools and ideas that they can implement to make their businesses as productive as possible), and
   3. Organized my resources (created a list of tools and ideas that I will be bringing to you through this blog).

With all that planning behind me, the stress of sitting down to write a blog post has washed away and I look forward to sharing the tools that I come across, as well as the organizing philosophies that I implement daily, with each of you. Thank you, Mr. Covey.  And, to the business owners out there, welcome to The Efficient Office!