I am joined by expert organizer, Kathi Burns to discuss one of the most difficult aspects of being an entrepreneur… Being organized! We discuss tips, tricks, and advice on how to stay ahead of the clutter in your head and in your workplace. Get ready for some great organizing hacks that you can use to get your business organized and your life energized.
Kathi Burns helps her clients lead a fulfilled and organized life that combines both balance and freedom. She has published two books and her advice has been featured in multiple national media outlets including Oprah Magazine, Martha Stewart Living and Better Homes and Gardens, Entrepreneur Magazine and more.
Date: July 14, 2020
Episode: 13
Title: Norman Farrar introduces Kathi Burns, a Professional Organizer, Stylist, Author and Speaker and has over 20 Years of Experience in Communication and Organization.
Subtitle: Set your goals and get organized.
Final Show Link: https://lunchwithnorm.com/episodes/13-organized-energized-kathi-burns/
In this episode of Lunch With Norm… ,Norman Farrar introduces Kathi Burns, a Professional Organizer, Stylist, Author and Speaker and has over 20 years of experience in communication and organization.
Kathi holds a Bachelor of Science in Communications, a Board Certified Professional Organizer, Image Consultant and Paper Flow Specialist. She discussed one of the most difficult aspects of being an entrepreneur, the tips and tricks on how to stay ahead of the clutter in your head and in the workplace.
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Norman 0:03
Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, a.k.a. The Beard Guy and welcome to another Lunch With Norm. So today we have a first, we’re actually going to be broadcasting live on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, a whole bunch of social media channels. So we’re going to give it a shot. So if you’re new to Lunch With Norm, sit back, kick back, enjoy. If you have any questions, just let me know. So today, we have another first, my orange background if you can see it and another first, we have a husband and wife team, not on the same day. But we have Kathi Burns today and we have Rob Burns, her husband, on Thursday. So Kathi is going to be talking to us about organizing your life as an entrepreneur, and Rob is going to be talking to us about some really cool video marketing. So anyways, without further ado, let me introduce my friend Kathi Burns. Hi, Kathi. How are you?
Kathi 0:59
I am doing fantastic. Thanks so much for having me on, Norm. This is gonna be a fun lunch.
Norman 1:05
It is, you have your lunch by the way.
Kathi 1:07
I have my breakfast.
Norman 1:09
Okay, I have my coffee.
Norman 1:13
So, Kathi, so you are a Board Certified organizer and I know that. I want to know a little bit more about you. But what’s something that I heard about is that this whole thing came about because you were actually a captain, right? Your race? What am I trying to say? Here we go again. what? I said this last week. Soon as you go live, it’s like I can’t talk. But the boat captain with a B correct, right. And you, this, all came about?
Kathi 1:47
Ocean Operator Licensed Captain.
Norman 1:49
Oh, Ocean Operator Licensed Captain. See I can’t even operate a canoe. I can’t even get a license for canoe. They don’t let me on the water. But this started because you were always in these small rooms and you had a duffel bag, and you couldn’t get organized. So you decided that you had to get organized, or you’d go mad. Is that correct?
Kathi 2:13
Well, exactly like when you set off to see and you have a duffel bag, you better have everything, anything you need, because there’s no turning back. You can’t just hit shore and get , or Amazon anything you want, when you’re out to sea. So it came about that I would have to be super organized when I packed and then most importantly, I had to when I unpacked a board, I had to know where everything was because when a squat hits or when something happens, you need to grab your foul weather gear, you need to know exactly where everything is. So I got used to living very small and very organized. I’ve transferred that over into organizing within homes or offices, because it’s really the same concept just on a much grander scale, with a home with 300,000 possessions.
Norman 3:00
Right. So you just took that idea and came up, how to work with families as well as businesses?
Kathi 3:10
Absolutely. What I realized the big aha moment, I remember exactly where I was, I was in the Gulf Stream, it was night, I was thinking about everything that I had left behind and unsure, and realizing that none of that stuff even had any significance to me. So when I would come back to shore, and I would come back to my little apartment, I would start purging immediately because I would realize that none of it was even significant. So when it was good, I purged, and then what happened is it made it much easier to pack to get ready to go again, because I would go, one, two months at a time out to sea. So, downsizing and simplifying is a magical thing and when you’re removed from your stuff, it’s much easier to understand that it’s not important, really. So really, it’s just taking that skill set to the entrepreneurs and to the homeowners doing the same exact thing, helping them have clarity on what’s important and what’s not in their life. The average woman has 300,000 possessions, which I said a little bit earlier. That’s crazy. So is it stuff that we need, use or love? I don’t know. That’s the discussion.
Norman 4:22
Right? So, once you How long did it take you? Well, first of all, you’re doing this you said for a couple of years. When you were on the ocean. When did you start the business?
Kathi 4:36
I started the business in 2003. So, I met a man, I fell in love. I stopped being a wanderlust person. I went from a boat captain to a travel writer and then I wanted to settle down. So what are you going to do when you settle down, you’re going to do what your skill set is and I’ve been an entrepreneur for over 30 years, anyhow. So for me, it made sense to to help people understand that their possessions and the stuff around them really isn’t as significant as they think it is, which gives them the ability to let go and when they let go of all the fluff in their life, so to speak, then they have more freedom and they’re able to live their purpose and that’s the whole sneaky thing about organizers is not about this stuff. It’s about the freedom that we can give people to do what they really want to do. With entrepreneurs, it’s so very important that they don’t have the distractions laying around so that they can really focus on doing what they want to do, which is why they started their business.
Norman 5:38
That’s why I brought you on because we talk about different types of apps that we can use to pause our inbox or turn off Skype. But there’s so many other things that we can do. I just want to step back a bit and just let people know that you’re not just somebody that organizes a couple of things here and there and you’re very well known. You are what we call it in Amazon, the gurus, right. But you’re a guru when it comes to organizing, and you’ve been all over the place, you’ve had your books on Oprah, you’ve had them. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Kathi 6:19
Well, basically, I’ve been a good alliance for a lot of magazines. Real simple entrepreneur, Martha Stewart Better Homes and Gardens loves me, Reader’s Digest, because I can give them sound bites and I can give them information. When freelance writers contact me it’s very easy for me to give them a whole bunch of information that they can then translate into an article. Also, new segments are really fun for me because I’ve been blessed to be featured on Good Morning America really early on in my career as a successful woman on business. That was huge and that just opened the floodgates for all the local TV stations and other new segments, because I can walk in and give them their bullet points in their five minute segment, they’re lower thirds, and they’re done and, again, everybody, no matter who they are need systems so that they can live their life better. Without systems, it’s really hard, you’re just caught up in the muck of your stuff, basically. So that’s how that went. I’ve just been blessed to be a part of the media, and to help freelance writers write their articles for these magazines. It’s fun.
Norman 7:34
I bet and the other thing too, and we were talking about this, the other day when we hopped on a call, and I really wasn’t expecting to be talking about this today and it hit me how important it is to get organized. But the other thing I was wondering, when we started talking, was it more gender specific, was it more, females doing this or the males. I was just saying that my son Kelsey had just gone through and reorganized everything in the house, which was fantastic. Thank you, Kelsey. But , it does make things so much easier to be able to go. Okay, I can go here for that. I can go over there for that and anyways, I was just wondering if you thought that there’s this persona around it, where it’s more for females and for men, and I know that I shouldn’t say that. But is that a fact?
Kathi 8:30
Well, what happens Norm is that females have the propensity to look at the micro to look at the small details, and men don’t have as much to look at the small details. You’re looking at the end game. I think it comes down to the hunt and flight and flight, the guy went out and gathered and had linear focus on getting the bees, the woman handled all the details around the home, she dealt with everything besides killing the beast. So I think just sociologically in the way that we evolved, it’s come to that. But, I have a lot of men clients that really want to create the system so that they can, again, focus, because focus for men is so very important. Whereas women are more micro, more or doing all around my ADD probably, because we have to be absolutely little details happening. So, but for the men, if they can eliminate the stuff that’s distracting them from killing the beast and from making the sale and from getting their success, then they’re more happy. So I think a lot, there are men and women that are both my clients,it just really depends on their end goal and if they’re open and receptive, to listening to ways to make their life better. That’s all. Women are more used to asking for help than men as well.
Norman 9:50
Right. That’s interesting. Oh, let’s get into this now and let’s get some pointers. What would you do first, how would you take a look at making a checklist? What would it be?
Kathi 10:07
Well, you have to start out with when I work with people one on one, which I do virtually as well. It’s about what’s working in their business and what’s not working in their business or their life. Either way, it doesn’t matter, like what’s working, okay, this is working in that that gives you an idea of how they think, and how they use your space and how they use their time and then there’s always something no matter how good we are and how successful we are, that there’s things that we can tweak. So, the first thing is, do you have systems running behind the scenes? Have you taken the time to implement systems that will handle all the little stuff so that you’re not, I call it getting stuck in your busyness? Instead of being able to get down to business, oftentimes, we get stuck in that busy stuff, which is perhaps having our contact database up to date doing quick books. Maybe we hate doing bookkeeping, but we’re insisting on doing our books, right? Why not just job it out. So having all those things in place, allows people to have more clarity and really focus on the job at hand. So, systems behind systems that are working and taking the time to do that. Oftentimes people say, Well, I don’t have time to get organized, really, you don’t have time not to get organized, it takes time to set, set, step back and create those systems to support you so that you can do the big stuff, the big picture stuff, which is going to just pull you forward.
Norman 11:36
Okay, so I was wondering, when we were talking before you said that there was a secret hack to creating an organized and energized life. So what’s that hack?
Kathi 11:47
That hack is this, set aside one four hour block every single week for your big project for your big goal. No one does this. So what happens is, if you don’t have that it takes four out, when I work with clients, typically one on one, it’s always a minimum four hours. Because what happens if you’re really focused on a project, it takes about an hour and a half to get into it, you have two hours there that you’re just cranking it out, and then you have to have closure to wind down. Now what happens with most people’s big projects, they keep getting backburner, they keep getting back burner, because they just don’t have the time to think big and think about that big project. So with the four hour block, I always say same day, same time, same bat channel, maybe it’s Wednesday from noon to four is going to be your big project time, right? If you have that time set aside every week, think about it. That’s 16 hours a month, sometimes 20 we have five weeks that you’ve worked on your big goal, your big end project, because the big projects take a lot of time and a lot of resources and a lot of reflection and a lot of planning to implement. So if you have 16 hours a month, where you’re really working on that big thing, you’ll get to it, you’ll get to it very quickly. But without that, it’s just kind of, I don’t have time. I really wanted to do that project, I really wanted to launch or whatever. But you didn’t have, you kind of if you willy nilly and you do, oh, I’ll do 15 minutes here and an hour here and two hours there, it doesn’t ever come to fruition as such. So that’s the big hack. If you can’t take anything away today, make sure you have one four hour block every week, for that big thing that you want to get accomplished.
Norman 13:41
Just before this call, I was talking to somebody, and we had a zoom call, and I kept hearing Ding, ding and this is about five minutes into it and I asked them what it was. He said, Oh, those are just my Skype messages.
Norman 13:56
I said how do you get anything done. You’ve got five messages. came in while you’re talking to me, I was watching you, and you’re looking down reading the Skype message while I’m talking to you. I mean, does that happen during the day? He goes, Yeah, it’s crazy and I think it’s so important that you take your advice, blocking that for hours. But if you don’t have the apps, sort of like freedom.io, or just pausing your inbox in Gmail, it’s impossible to do and I know, I was listening to Ben Cummings once and he said, that what he does is he goes over to Starbucks, and I don’t know if that’s possible right now, depending where you live. But he just went over there every Wednesday, and he just got his work done. But, I mean, your advice is great. But a lot of entrepreneurs, they just have a thousand different types of interruptions coming in, and I think that’s what they have to control. Do you have any advice around that?
Kathi 14:58
Absolutely. I mean, Turn off your notifications. See, what happens is this, number one, never check your inbox first thing in the morning. That’s just embarrassing and that’s huge. Because I don’t know if you have thought about this before, but your inbox is nothing but a reactionary type of thing. So anybody that’s emailing you wants you to do something, okay? So you have to react and do things, right? It’s not like a proactive type of process where you’re taking control. So you’re reacting to requests or whatever, click here, call me right this, right. So not checking your inbox first thing in the morning. What you want to do instead is you want to plan your day before it plans you. So you want to actually sit down in the morning, drink your coffee, make your list, figure out what you want to accomplish that day. Know your big goal that you’re going to check off the list and then only then should you go into your inbox. Communication is crazy right now. I mean, we have Skype, right? We have Facebook Messenger, we have the inbox, we have the phone, we have the text. I mean, we have, it’s just too much. So you’ve got to really control the things that are coming into your life. Everybody’s saying, oh, we’re all ADHD and we’re all the ADD right now. I think we are and it’s because of technology, there is no possible way that we can keep up with the technology and get down to business. I mean, you kind of have to have a premeditated time. What I tell people when I work in corporate environments is, don’t check your inbox first thing in the morning, if it’s insisting that you have to go to work early, check it and then get to work on time, right, but have a controlled amount of time that you’re going to be in your inbox, maybe it’s from 11:30 to noon, maybe then it’s at the end of the day. Having a tagline in your inbox in your email is also really a good little secret hack. So, this is your tagline. In order to serve my clients better, I’m checking my inbox twice a day. If this is urgent, call me or message me , message me or whatever your favorite form of distraction is. But, I will return your call and get back with you within 24 hours. So it makes you more professional, in order to serve my clients better. I’m not in my inbox. I’m not living here, but I will get back with you. But if it is urgent, reach out to me via this other way. That has rocketed up productive productivity within some of the companies that I’ve worked with and so it’s a magic little email signature, right?
Norman 17:43
Yeah, it’s the other thing that I’ve used to try to funnel because you have 10 different communication channels and it’s really hard to go back and forth and it’s a time waster. So I did some research, and I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, but I found this app and I have nothing to do with it. I don’t sell anything on these talks. This is just what I use, Franz, I think it’s f ra n z. It channels all of your communication into one channel and it just tells you what it’s coming from. Then you can see it all come in, you can pause it, and it just makes life so easier. Have you seen anything like that?
Kathi 18:24
I do not know Franz, but I’m gonna definitely check it out. Because, like my husband, he’s a Skype user or if I don’t have Skype on, he’s all upset with me. It’s like, Facebook, Messenger drives me insane. So having it all come into one place, I think would be really, really great, I have all my emails coming into one inbox, and that helps me dramatically, but as far as all the other methods of communication. Thanks, Norm. I want to check that out. That’s good data.
Norman 18:52
Yeah, and one of the things when we’re on boarding clients, I think it’s really important, I think the entrepreneur has to manage their expectations just like they would a client, like you said time block that four hours. One of the hardest things I think, I found a lot of entrepreneurs having problems to do is taking care of their BNC tasks and one of the things I do, I try to take a block of time, Kelsey knows this. I block everything if I’m going to go for a walk, I block it out. I like I do this the night before, and things come up but things change but one of the things I love doing is blocking about half an hour to an hour, and it could be broken up into two different areas. But for my see tasks, I can get 10, 20 see tasks done just like that and it clears the list and that’s a huge problem for entrepreneurs is that list keeps getting bigger and if you’re even though I know people that just don’t even have a list, they go from their head, which I don’t know how they do it, but I work from a list. It just feels so good to get those 10 things or 20 things off in half an hour or maybe even less.
Kathi 20:11
Absolutely. When I do time management with clients, I talk about this concept of umbrella each day. So, when I go through a time management process, it’s like, okay, Monday is going to be possibly your planning day, let’s take Tuesday as an appointment day or a call day and by the way, well, it used to be when you are out. When you are out, that usually when you can drop by and do networking and selling networking events and I think maybe, Wednesday is the big project that, that’s the day where you’re willing to tackle things. So having an overarching idea of each day and what type of day it is, helps people a lot. Keep to the routines, your idea of blocking everything is exactly that and I take it a bit further and say okay, this is going to be the networking day, this is going to be the productivity day, this is going to be the project day, this is going to be maybe the the admin day and having it that way. Again, everybody thinks differently. So, for some people that works really well, because they know, okay, Wednesday is the day that I’m going to really tackle the big stuff. I’m going to have the wrap down Friday and make sure everything is planned for the next week. So having those blocks of intentions is awesome and what happens is as you said, it’s never perfect, but if you know what you didn’t do, you know what you need to do. So if you don’t have a list of everything that you want to do, you don’t even know what you didn’t do. So you can’t do it. It’s just like the people who don’t have the list or don’t know what they’re going to accomplish. They don’t know whether they accomplished anything or not because they didn’t have anything to cross off, basically.
Norman 22:09
Um, what was I gonna say? Oh, gosh, I just lost for words from that cough. Oh, we’ll come back to it. How’s that?
Kathi 22:19
It’s blocking the time and then not really, if you don’t know what you should be doing, you don’t know what you didn’t do.
Norman 22:27
I know that, Yes and by building the list, what you can also see is what you’re doing on a repetitive basis and these are the types of things that you can outsource and one of the early on things that I noticed with tasks are there was so many repetitive things that were blocking me from getting my priorities done. I could take those lists of C tasks for the most part, send them over to a VA and have them do it and even one of the things that, I don’t about you Kathi, but one of the things that I’ve done over the last year, maybe two, is I have a VA check my inbox and she goes, I use Gmail, and she color codes, everything. So if it’s urgent, I know it’s red with an exclamation mark, if it’s a receipt, she takes a receipt and files it but she lets me know by having a green star and we color code everything. So I can take a look at my inbox and now she clears out anything I don’t need to know about. Anything that looks like spam, she automatically archives, so we keep it tight in my inbox, I can go into it and I might have 40 or 50 emails in it in a day and then they get cleared out, we start fresh, and it’s just beautiful. So there’s all sorts of little things by just creating that little list that you can just give to somebody. It costs very little and just gets so much extra time.
Kathi 23:56
A lot of people don’t want to take the time to do that. So at the beginning of every time management session, we write down all the things that they do, right, and I think you’re in COVID right now. We’re getting a lot more clarity about all the little stuff we used to do that we no longer need to do, really, and we see things are falling off of our schedules, which is great. But having the clarity of knowing every single thing that you do, then like you say, you can go in to job it out and people don’t want to take the time to train people. But again, it pays to get organized, it pays to create those SOPs in those systems so that you can jot it out, and then it’s off your back. Then you can actually do what you want to do, which is not get stuck in the busyness of your business. You don’t want to be checking boxes, checking emails and trying to weed things out. You just don’t want to do it. You want to really move forward and do your dream, which is why we’re all entrepreneurs. We all have that big dream and it’s not the busy stuff and we all get saturated by the busy stuff if you don’t make the list, like you say, and figure out how to delegate the little bitty stuff. I mean, I have so many entrepreneurs who are still doing quickbooks and they absolutely hate it. It’s like why is that my job out? Why are you still doing accounting when you hate it? So the idea is anything on your list that you hate definitely job that that puppy out. Anything that’s on your list that you can do, then that stuff that’s at your paygrade, right? So I always say don’t do stuff below your pay grade. There’s no reason to do that. Just like having someone go into your inbox and prioritize it for you, is so smart. I mean, that’s brilliant. That’s why you get so much done, Norms, got so many systems in place there.
Norman 25:44
Yeah, the book I read way back was the E-Myth by Michael Gerber and he basically was talking about the sales cycle of an entrepreneur and something that you brought up a little bit earlier is you getting that entrepreneur to have a change in their mindset. So many people want to keep things close to their chest and they don’t think they have time, but by not taking the time, all they’re doing is suffocating, and they’ll never grow. Anytime they try to bring on somebody to train, they don’t train them properly and that’s a whole other thing about how to train somebody to work with you. But the challenge I find for the majority of entrepreneurs, is how do you put the flame under their butt to make change?
Kathi 26:42
Well, it’s funny you say Michael Gerber, because I actually worked with his office. He lives here in San Diego, I actually organized his file system with an assistant. So he walks his talk and, he implements systems like as well, as what he says. But anyhow, how do you light a fire? You have to think about the pain point. It’s like, how long has it been since you’ve really done what you wanted to do and what you started your company for? Have you done that? Or have you just been stuck in your mind new, sharp and unable to move forward? Are you not accelerating your business? So you just have to think about what’s important and what’s not. What’s important is growing and scaling and having success and doing what you love to do, which is why you started your business. What’s not important is all the little nitty-gritty things that you shouldn’t be doing anyhow. So I think Norm, it goes back to again, the creating the list is clarity. That’s always the beginning of every time management session, is what do you do every single day? Hey, let’s just list it and people hate that too. It’s like I don’t want to list it. That’s so tedious to list everything that I do every day. That’s the only way that you are going to get clarity to know what you should be doing and what you shouldn’t be doing and having a way to job it out. Because I do a lot of job descriptions for assistance and VA’s for clients. But you can’t do a job description until you know what you need them to do and you don’t know what you need them to do until what you shouldn’t be doing. Then once that happens, it’s kind of magic. Like the once you have it in writing of everything that you need someone to do, that person manifests. I mean, it’s part of what really gets me jazzed about organizing and energized and helping people create systems is if you have clarity on what you want. It shows up, absolutely, it shows up. I mean, I help people get the guy, they get the home, they get the job promotion, they start their career, they start their new company, once they have the clarity and they can visualize it and the clarity comes from removing all the fluff around what you think you should be doing for you, where you’re getting stuff if you remove all that, I call it muck. If you remove the muck from your life and from your business, then you have clarity, and then you reach your goals. I mean, it’s kind of a magical mystery, but it works every time. So I mean, I could go on and on with stories about clients that have actually gotten what they wanted to get out of getting organized,
Norman 29:20
Right. So I can’t agree more. Once you just organize just my office, I have a home office and if things start to pile up, my whole mindset, it’s so much better, so much clearer. I just have a better feel for the day going in. My mother used to say if you were depressed, make your bed and not that I go into the office depressed but if I clean up my office, let’s say I said a day, things start to pile up. I do it on Saturday, Saturday morning for a few minutes. It just feels that much much better to just jump into the day, everything looks good. I know where everything is and I think by removing the muck, I mean it really does help that.
Kathi 30:08
Well a pile is a call to action. So a pile is a traffic jam somewhere in either your space or your psyche. So a pile represents one of three things, indecision, procrastination, or avoidance. All of those things are going to be distractibles whenever you’re trying to focus on your job. Organizers were always saying keep things vertical, that’s why. Because a pile is an unfinished something or other that’s going to be weighing in the back of your mind and you’re right. If you have a pile, a couple piles sitting around your space when you’re trying to work. It is a distraction. It’s not going to allow you to laser focus on your task at hand. So yeah, avoiding piles at all costs is number one, never have a pile anywhere in your life because it is just something that’s not done. It’s a call to action and they’re magical too. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but if you have a T shirt and then you have another t shirt on the floor on a chair, when you come back into the room, there’s going to be more there. I don’t know how it happens. There’s little genies or older guys are some that are doing it. Maybe little gnomes in your case, but they’re magical. You’ll come back in and there’ll be more stuff piled there. It’s just bizarre, but it’s true.
Norman 31:26
There is an exception to the rule Kathi, that’s socks. I don’t know how but you always get one less.
Kathi 31:34
Hey, well, I have a solution for that. Have you heard of the missing sock bag?
Norman 31:39
No.
Kathi 31:40
Okay, so when you find the lonely soldiers and you’re like, don’t put them in your drawer, throw them in a bag I use a lot. I use it like a pillowcase and you keep it in your laundry room. So when you find all those lonely soldiers just throw them in the bag and what’s cool about that is that they reunite while you’re not watching and when you go back and empty the bag like that once a month or once every other month, they’re all there and their little glorious pairs.
Norman 32:08
There we go. Alright, we’re kind of winding down. I’d like to get a couple of do’s, don’ts. Do you have a list of things to do? A list of things to do and not to do?
Kathi 32:22
Well, what you want to do it first off to do is plan, pre plan, plan, plan, plan, know what you’re going to do the week before it starts the following week, know what you’re going to do the day before it starts. Okay? So that’s something that you have to know what you’re going to do. Otherwise, at the end of the day, you don’t even know what you did. I mean, how many times I’ve had it, we all have it. It’s like, wow, what did they get accomplished today? Because they just kind of took ourselves over. So that’s a big to do is to know what you want to do in advance of doing it. What you should not do is don’t get stuck in minutiae. You should always avoid repetitive tasks as you said, job them out. Don’t get stuck in the busyness of your business. If you’re stuck, you want to really focus on what you need to get done, not all the small stuff, the distractions, what you should do is absolutely have that four hour block of time every week to get things accomplished that you want to get done in the big thing, right? That’s going to dedicate you forward for success. You want to have that four hour block. What you don’t want to do, is you don’t want to spend all day trying to catch up. You don’t want to also check your emails first thing in the morning or don’t have your inbox turned on all day. I mean, I have clients who say I have to keep my inbox on because someone might want something. It’s like yeah, so no, don’t go into your inbox in premeditated grip blocks of time. It’s like Skype, what is it called, Skype your inbox, whatever that tactical thing is for fighting, be strategic about your inbox basically. Oh, is this Skype?
Kathi 34:15
Is that what it is?
Norman 34:18
For your inbox?
Kathi 34:20
Yeah, not on Skype. I think Skype because now it’s another thing but, basically strategically go into your inbox don’t just keep it on all day long and don’t keep other notifications and bells and whistles ringing, turn off my phone in silent, my messages are by silence when I’m actually doing tasks. I have one of my CEOs, when we work from home this is the thing to do is avoid distractions. So one of my clients, he has different hats that he wears, you would love this. He has different hats that he wears based on what type of job he’s doing for. So he has like a fire hat. He’s putting out some other people’s fire. He has a big project construction hat whenever he’s in the thought construction and this allows his family to know what he’s doing and whether he can be disturbed at the time. If you have people walking by your desk, turn your desk away or shut the door, raise a flag, you can have a little flat, you just have fun with it. But show your family somehow that you’re not to be disturbed. It takes four to six weeks to change a habit. So it’s going to take four to six weeks if you keep telling them over and over do not disturb me during when the flags are raised or when the hats on or whatever, because I’m in deep thought. So, eliminate the distractions around your workspace and set up your workspace for success. You want to have all your tools within arm’s reach. It’s that million dollar real estate idea, right? So the average US person, the executive that gets him in a corporate environment to try to get a ream of paper, whatever they’re on 18 minutes. How long do you think entrepreneurs are gone? 18 minutes because they have Fido out there, they have the fridge, they have possibly the wife or the kid that’s before they can come back to their desk and get back to work. So keep everything within arm’s reach in your work environment and make sure that your work environment is safe from distractions. So I think that’s number one for remote workers. I talked about this in the free gift that we’re going to give out the six steps to organize your amazing home office. It’s like eliminating distractions and taking control of the environment. It’s a very important thing for people working from home, remote working.
Norman 36:48
Well, you just gave me an idea about the client that you have with the hats. I’m gonna put a ribbon in my beard.
Norman 36:55
There we go. If the kids look at me, or my wife looks at me, I have a red ribbon, a yellow ribbon, they’ll know.
Kathi 37:01
They know not to come in and talk to you. You’ve got it. Everybody has their own thing, but you definitely need one. Because otherwise, and hey, let’s not base on the families, but they don’t really know. They think you’re just working and they think it’s not a big deal, and they don’t know your brains’ 50 light years away. So yeah, I think having that. I love that. Oh, I gotta see a picture of that.
Norman 37:26
All right, I’ll send you a picture.
Kathi 37:28
Yay. Thank you.
Norman 37:31
Yes, exactly. So I think we’re coming to the end, unless you have anything else you’d like to add and I know we’ll talk about the giveaway in a second.
Kathi 37:41
Not really, it’s just like full speed ahead with thought. You can really accelerate your business, if you stop and pause and see what you shouldn’t be doing and figure out a way to job it out effectively. That’s really the kicker right there. Job out the small stuff and make sure to give your room to breathe to create the new stuff, which is that four hour block every week. That’s cute. You’ll be amazed and I want to hear it back from someone who really did that big thing that they’ve been trying to do for two years. You’ll knock it off probably in a month, 16 hours of time. It’ll be done.
Norman 38:18
Well, I will let you know if I hear back from anybody. So I think that comes to the end of the show. I really want to or the call I really want to appreciate like, we just talked about this the other day and I said, this is perfect. Like, can you come on in? You jumped on right away. Kathi, I know that you have something special for anybody that’s listening. It’s a free giveaway. Why don’t you tell everybody a little bit about that.
Kathi 38:44
So it’s six steps to organize your amazing home office. Everyone can use a little bit of tweet to make your home office more effective and more efficient. So if you go to KathiBurns.com, that’s K A T H I Burns.com. You can download your free gift right there and it’ll give you six steps to really get clarity on what you can do to move your business forward and to create more success in your life. So it’s a freebie, it’s a little report. Have at it. I love for you all to have it. Again, it’s Kathiburns.com, K A T H I Burns.com, just go there and you can download it right away.
Norman 39:26
Tell us a little bit about your new book.
Kathi 39:30
So I have a How to Master Your Muck and it’s being revised with a new edition specifically for entrepreneur work at home remote workers. This edition covered everything that you need to know to organize a business, be it corporate or whatever. The new ones are going to be much more about remote workers setting up your space for success. So it’ll be a Master You Muck 2.0.
Norman 39:56
Perfect. So if anybody’s trying to reach you, trying to get organized, where can they contact you?
Kathi 40:03
They can contact me at Kathi. Again kathi@organizedandenergized.com. So organizedandenergized.com is the website where you can find a whole bunch of stuff and a bunch of articles and blogs and help tips and products. I have a home office organizing course. I also have a home ready made simple course. So where you can organize your home from the front door to the back door. There’s all sorts of resources there for you and again, just grab your free report though to start out with and then you can check me out. You’ll get links to check out the brand new website which is organized and energized.
Norman 40:41
Fantastic. Thank you for coming on and I can’t wait to download my copy and also, I guess next Thursday or this Thursday coming up your hubby. So Rob Burns will be coming on talking about video marketing, but thank you, Kathi, for coming on short notice, I really appreciate it and Kelsey, we’re just closing out here so tell everybody what they need to do.
Kelsey 41:08
You can follow us on social media via Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest. TikTok. We have everything. So just search Norman Farrar, and you should be able to find us there. Yeah, that’s about it.
Norman 41:22
Okay, everybody. Well, thanks for tuning in Lunch With Norm this Tuesday edition and check us out next Thursday at noon Eastern Standard Time. See you later.
Kathi 41:35
Thanks, Norm.
