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Elfa office, Container Store

The neighbors are talking.  Clients have been telling me that their neighbors are questioning why they are working with a professional organizer.  They are asking because these clients happen to be very successful people, who seem to have it all together.  And they do!  They are on top of all their priorities and are actually very organized.  So why do they need a professional organizer?

They need a professional organizer because in the twenty-first century they need to get MORE-GANIZED.  There are new challenges that we didn’t encounter in much of the last century.  Here are just a few:

• Children can’t just go outside and play.  They need to be chauffeured to a series of activities and each of these activities come with lots of paperwork and equipment to organize.

• More homes have dual-incomes, so housekeeping responsibilities don’t fall on any one set of shoulders.  In the busiest households the day just runs out of hours to get organized.

• The global economy has made it cheaper than ever to buy goods and it’s more cost-effective and easier to replace broken items than get them fixed.  With stricter recycling policies, however, it is harder than ever to get rid of broken and unused items.

The old maxim “a place for everything and everything in its place” is not enough.  We’ve got more “things” than “place.”  You have to store with a plan.

Often a client will point to a closet and tell me “this one is pretty well organized.”  What she means is “everything FITS in there.”  Here are some of the problems with equating fitting with organizing:

1.   Much of what is fitted into closets, drawers, and cupboards have been there so long they are unnecessary. This prevents more useful items from fitting in.

2.   Filling every inch of space in a closet often prevents accessibility.  If you can’t access what you want, when you want it, then it’s not good organizing.

3.   The more tightly-packed a closet is, the more likely that important items are going to be hidden.  This leads to unnecessary purchases of items you already have.  Because items like food, batteries, and medicine expire, packing it in can cost you money.

Also, even in exemplary homes, there is usually “that one room.”  Maybe it’s the basement or the guest room or the dreaded “multi-purpose room,” but there tends to be at least one room where stuff has to pile up, rendering it useless.

Can you afford to have a useless room? If, for example, you have an 8 room home and you pay $35,000 in mortgage payments each year, you’d be spending $4,375 a year on a room to store stuff you don’t need.  Maybe you’re OK with paying for that room to be used as storage, but how does it make you feel to have to look at it?

So for these reasons, even the most beautiful, pristine homes can have problems lurking under those clear surfaces and stylish closet doors.  They need more-ganizing.

Getting more-ganzied doesn’t mean you are obsessive. It simply means that in this busy crazy world, you need more productivity and more peace of mind.  Why not control what you can?

The secret is not to organize based on what fits, but to organize with intention, a skill not taught in the last century.

So if you are one of my very successful clients, who has committed to getting more-ganized, congratulations! I applaud your wisdom.  If, on the other hand, you have been considering hiring organizing help, but worry that it makes you a failure, forget it!  Do what smart, successful people are doing these days and don’t settle for “pretty well organized.”  Get more-ganized!