“How did this happen?” you ask yourself one day as you scan the clutter occupying almost every corner of your home or office. Seemingly without your help, the heaps of items that are scattered about or piled haphazardly appeared out of nowhere. It’s just there.
It can happen easily. You go about your day bringing new items into your space only to place them on the handiest flat surface. Over the next week or so, you move them from place to place with no particular plan on what to do with them. And there they sit until the mounting clutter can no longer be ignored. Suddenly, you feel overwhelmed. Something has to be done, but where do you start?
The next question is how to sort and organize it in a way that you’ll be able to find things when you need them. It sounds simple, but for many of us it’s not. Some people have no idea how to do that, despite their attempts at organizing their stuff. Ultimately, they are stymied. Their work and daily activities are affected negatively.
Not everyone has the ability to organize. It takes a certain skill to sort things into sensible piles when there are so many categories under which they can be filed. Perhaps more importantly, it requires the ability to separate emotions from needs. You need to be able to toss unnecessary items such as those that represented a memorable time in your life. Do you really need those faded pennants from your high school football team’s last win? Or those slightly damaged items that you “might” find a use for one day?
Have you ever come back from the store and, wanting to keep the receipt, wondered where it would be safe? You could put it in your kitchen drawer, in your desk, in a safe, or create a file for it. But what if it’s a one-of-a-kind item? What do you do with it? While working to declutter, you are likely to find numerous single items without a home. This is just one of many reasons to hire a professional organizer.
Do you work from your home office, either as a remote worker or as an entrepreneur? While focusing on business, which takes up most of your day, there’s little time left to set up and organize all of your paperwork and digital documents, images, email and the like. Without a system, you can soon realize that the items you need are not as readily available as you require them to be. Even your computer or digital device can be affected by a lack of organization.
With everything scattered throughout your computer, things are more difficult to locate, and your computer has to work harder during its search and file processes. This is where a professional organizer can help, one who specializes in digital organizing, like Structured Space.
Imagine being able to turn on your computer, go directly to a file and immediately find what you need. Think what a timesaver that would be for you. If you have an assistant, that person will also be able to readily find a specific item rather than scouring every file and folder on your computer to locate it.
Emails are another challenge. Undoubtedly, you receive important information in emails that you want to save for future reference. These could contain serial numbers, receipts, correspondence shared in solving a problem, or even notes from a seminar. You could copy them into another document and save that, but you’re still left with making a decision on where to save it. It would be so much better to have a good system that works for your particular behavior patterns.
Unfortunately, many business operators do not have the time to develop one. Instead, they de-clutter their digital devices and computers periodically by erasing old, obsolete or duplicate items, but that only helps in the short term.
This lack of a workable system leads to considerable loss of time that could be put to better use. You need to be able to prioritize tasks and recover important information more effectively. This is where a professional organizer comes in.
What makes a Professional Organizer special?
When you were young, your mother did all the organizing based on what made sense to her. A professional organizer uses similar skills but adds others that are more specialized or helpful. For instance, the organizer might discover that you need extra help in dealing with your need to declutter. A good professional will have easy access to many complementary services that can maximize the results. These can include coaches, handymen, closet creators, junk haulers, art appraisers, movers, therapists, and even municipal officials.
One important aspect of professional organizers is that they have gone through rigorous training and certification through one of the Professional Organizers associations of which there are several. The National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO) specifies the code of ethics that professional organizers must follow. This ensures that clients are treated with respect. NAPO has branches across the United States while other countries have their own Professional Organizers organizations.
Amazing benefits of hiring a Professional Organizer
A professional organizer doesn’t just help you sort your stuff into boxes to keep, toss or recycle. He has the amazing ability to identify your specific needs and create a plan that you can follow for years to come. This plan will help you to stay focused and productive on the job and in your personal life, rather than being distracted by mounting clutter.
In essence, a professional organizer can improve your life significantly by creating order out of chaos and establishing lasting methods that defend against future clutter. Organizers don’t judge. They offer their opinions based on training and experience while helping you to find options that best fit you, your lifestyle and your situation.
Professional organizers can offer extensive assistance through their diversity. Perhaps you need someone to help your elderly mother organize her home to make it more user-friendly. Or you are setting up an office and can benefit from someone who can help you to do so in a coordinated fashion that addresses your workplace needs. Perhaps you are looking at downsizing an office. There are professional organizers who specialize in specific types of clients like these.
Apart from helping you to regain control of your life, a professional organizer’s work will enable you to save time and avoid chronic disorganization. He will customize his approach to meet your style and needs. It will be a system that makes sense to you and is easy to maintain. When you are ready to let things go but are struggling, a professional organizer is priceless.
Professional organizing saves time
Busy parents and single parents have the added burden of organizing for their entire family. Everyone comes with their own stuff which adds up over time. Did you know that just adding one baby to your family leads to a 30 percent increase in household possessions? Multiply that by each child and you have a lot of stuff to organize. How many hours do you think you’d spend constantly sorting and organizing it all?
Now imagine having a professional organizer design a workable plan that everyone can follow and how much easier your parental duties will be.
Corporate employees often need to work together and when things are in disarray, considerable time is lost searching. Spread that across each person using that file system or a digital collection of data and efficiency is gone. The right organizer can go through those dated and inefficient systems and come up with a much superior one that can make tasks go much quicker.
Professional Organizers handle the hard stuff
It can be difficult separating yourself from your stuff. This is tougher for some than for others. As habitual collectors by nature, we humans allow things to become an extension of ourselves. We attach ourselves to our belongings. Our stuff identifies us in some unique way. For some, collecting takes over their lives which can lead to extremely poor living conditions.
A study conducted between 2001 and 2005 by UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families found that families are drowning in stuff. Never before have we had as much stuff in a single family home. It should be no surprise that so many people are struggling to deal with clutter consumption and chronic disorganization.
How full is your garage? How much of it do you really need? How much of it are you attached to emotionally?
These are some of the hard decisions that a professional organizer will help you to resolve. He will handle those difficult tasks by helping you to discover options. If necessary, he will coordinate any additional services required to get you where you want to be. He can help with skills that you lack or that are difficult for you. By taking time to understand any emotional or physical challenges you face in relation to your stuff, a personal organizer can help you work through them.
Ultimately, when a professional organizer steps in to help it’s not about the stuff. It’s about the person who owns or interacts with those items.
Find things when you need them
There are numerous ways that a professional organizer can assist you. In order for you to find things when you need them, you must have a good sorting and labeling system. This usually involves organizing the various elements in a way that makes sense to you. An organizer will discuss with you all aspects of your processes to determine which method of organizing will work best.
Create custom behavior solutions
We all have our own unique way of doing things. It comes to us intuitively. If this fact is not taken into consideration it’s likely that a system put in place by someone else just won’t work for you. For this reason, a quality professional organizer will take the time to listen and observe your methods and discuss them with you while creating a better, more time and cost efficient system using your input to make it personal to your behaviors. This helps ensure that the solution is more likely to succeed.
What does Structured Space do differently?
Structured Space has taken a unique approach to helping people organize their digital information. CAR (Capture – Analyze – Resolve) is a system they’ve developed to aid in decluttering unnecessary documents and categorize important information, making it easily searchable.
If you’re thinking of going paperless, Structured Space will set up a system to convert paper information into digital storage. This is one of many ways you can reduce clutter around your office. The resulting well-organized database allows you to focus your efforts on tasks rather than on the distraction of disorganization.
Their equally unique digital workflow maintenance service consists of regular meetings with clients to help them preserve a well-cataloged space. They do it by guiding clients through each new development and helping them to gain a solid organizational footing proactively.
In short, Structured Space helps people get their digital information in order such as email access and usage. They help with digital workflow, organizing office spaces, time management, goal setting, priority management as well as productivity assessment and training. This makes Structured Space stand out from the crowd.
Moving?
This is a challenge many of us would rather avoid. If you are not well organized with your packing and unpacking, disarray will result. Moving is the time to clear out unwanted items and minimize what you transfer to your new place. A professional organizer can assist you in this regard as well as in sensible labeling and packing to make the entire job much less stressful and time-consuming.
Are you ready to get organized?
You can continue as before, going through your clutter every now and then only to have it return. Or you can change your approach to clutter and disorganization and get a more long-lasting and efficient result. If you choose the latter, get in touch with Structured Space now for a friendly, open-minded consultation on how we can develop a plan to suit your needs. Click here to get in touch today