Kathi Burns organizing executive news producer Jay Jones at FOX 5 San Diego.

(Transcription)

Raoul Martinez: Alright, welcome back everybody. We’ve all seen them in offices. My goodness yes we have, working in areas that are so messy you wonder how anybody can get any work done. Kathi Burns is here, thankfully. She’s made a career out of getting people organized. Before we get to the mess in our news room Kathi, make sure people know this is the brand new book How to Master Your Muck. Love the title by the way.

Kathi: Thank you very much.

Raoul Martinez: Did you come up with that?

Kathi: I did.

Raoul Martinez: I love that, How to Master Your Muck. This comes out September 1st. So take note if you’re messy and you know who you are, you’ve gotta get the book. Alright, Kathi’s here to kind of show us…we asked her to come in because our newsroom…we have issues, simply said. And you saw that first hand.

Kathi: Everybody has issues though.

Raoul Martinez: This is video that we shot a few days ago of just a random desk in our newsroom. I guess the person is going to remain nameless, we’re not going to say who it is? [inaudible] Anyway, look at this guy. When you first saw this, what goes through your mind?

Kathi: Well it wasn’t really functional. You need to have 60% of your desk clear in order for it to be functional and what happened with his desk is, it was so crowded we couldn’t even use the mouse. The mouse wouldn’t move around because of too much stuff.

Raoul Martinez: Could you even find the mouse?

Kathi: We found the mouse, found the monitor, that was good, it was vertical….

Raoul Martinez: Did you notice the color of the desk because I can’t tell…oh look at this….

Kathi: Isn’t that amazing?

Raoul Martinez: Now you worked wonders with Jay’s desk obviously. How in the world, because that wasn’t set up by the way, that was actually his desk. And how long did it take you to clean all that out?

Kathi: It took about five hours and that’s a year’s worth of stuff and clutter that we managed to organize and streamline in five hours.

Raoul Martinez: Five hours? Look at the difference. On the left, that’s Jay’s desk before and now…what we see on the right, is that something that is now functional for him for the way he works?

Kathi: It should be sustainable because what we did was we created different zones for the different types of things that come in to his desk. So he should be able to maintain it, we already had a little bit of a tweaking session and we’ll tweak it over the months.

Raoul Martinez: Because you kind of saw him kind of reverting back to his old ways and we kind of have to keep him in line a little bit?

Kathi: Well it’s just not perfect, you can’t get everything dead spot on at the beginning but we have holding zones which is the main thing.

Raoul Martinez: Okay, what do we need to know if we’re messy and we don’t know how to get organized. Give us the tips here because we need your help. My desk isn’t as bad but it’s not great.

Kathi: Well one of the biggest things that I find with clients are these business cards. Everybody has business cards, this is just a small batch, we’ve been scanning as we go. I highly recommend…they’re useless information and all, they think that they’re valuable but they’re useless. You couldn’t even find anything right? So what we do is we scan them in. Card Iris gave us a scanner. We scan these right in, so right into Outlook it turns into usable, valuable information and it’s quick.

Raoul Martinez: I have never seen one of these.

Kathi: It’s brilliant isn’t it? It’s so small.

Raoul Martinez: And it reads any kind of card?

Kathi: It reads any kind of card.

Raoul Martinez: Because there’s a lot of different cards.

Kathi: It reads any kind of card if it’s say…if it’s a photo type of thing it has issues, but it scans in and you can see it right there and you can type and change the information. Also this is another business card thing, this is useless.

Raoul Martinez: That’s useless? Because I have one.

Kathi: Well it’s not alphabetical, how are you going to know…or find, unless you have a photographic memory and you remember it’s at the beginning on the left, it’s not alphabetized. So these things I don’t think work as much as if he would have alphabetical tabs in them.

Raoul Martinez: Yikes.

Kathi: And these filers, everybody has the filers.

Raoul Martinez: The tray, like the in and the out tray that everybody has on their desk.

Kathi: Right, but what is it? What does it represent? No one really knows.

Raoul Martinez: Kathi, here is what I have to do to find anything.

Kathi: Exactly!

Raoul Martinez: Useless!

Kathi: So we want to go vertical, we want to go vertical with as many things as you can possibly do and that’ll make it more valuable information basically. Container Store came in and gave us some good products that we implemented right into the work stations so that everything can stay vertical.

Raoul Martinez: And the chances of…and we’re all concerned for Jay to make sure that he keeps his desk clean so are there exercises that …is there a way to basically change the way you think, the way you operate, the way you work day to day to keep things working nice and clean.

Kathi: Absolutely. See things come into his desk and now we have a place like when people barrage him with all this mail, they have an inbound place for it to go so that it’s not piled on his desk. He works at the end of each day to keep it sustainable and cleanup his act so to speak and put everything where it needs to go. We have it actually prioritized by timeline so that he can say you know, here is something that is a hot idea, here’s a cool idea, here’s an actual idea for this segment. So yeah, it is sustainable, he just needs to work it every day.

Raoul Martinez: Now when did you do this? A couple days ago?

Kathi: Yes, a couple days ago.

Raoul Martinez: This is live right now, you’re looking at his desk live so it’s still fairly clean, what about post-its, because he likes the post-its all over the place.

Kathi: Well we did get rid of a few post-its.

Raoul Martinez: He put them back, show the post-its.

Kathi: No, there is still some post-its there, those are ones he wanted to keep up there which is fine. I mean if he needed a visual reminder, that’s fine but you just don’t want post-its plastered everywhere.

Raoul Martinez: Clutter is bad, right? You hate clutter.

Kathi: It’s muck. Much and clutter, it doesn’t really work for you. You’ve got to master it, Raoul Martinez .

Raoul Martinez: Kathi, I need your help. Can you get to my desk?

Kathi: Absolutely. That’s what I do.

Raoul Martinez: There’s your book, How to Master Your Muck. It comes out September 1st.

Kathi: September 1st, nationally.

Raoul Martinez: North county by the way…if you need her help.

Kathi: Thank you.

Arthelle Neville: Be like me, just don’t have a desk. I don’t have a desk.

Kathi: That’ll solve the whole thing. I want to see your purse.

Raoul Martinez: Oooohhhh.

Woman: You want to see my drawers and all my stuff at home, you would be very frightened but because I must have issues it’s all very much aligned.

Raoul Martinez: I believe that’s page 78.

Arthelle Neville: You are what you eat, Raoul!