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Professional organizers: Come up with a system

Posted: Monday, August 11, 2008

Fifteen minutes a day.

That's all Julia Marlowe asks of her clients, who come to her with their homes cluttered and disorganized.

While she can help them make the tough decisions about what to toss or keep, staying organized takes routine maintenance, professional organizers here agreed.

"You'd be surprised at what you can do in 15 minutes," said Marlowe, who owns her own business called Athens Home Organizer.

As the pasta simmers, reshelve that pantry. When you put the laundry away, straighten up that closet and put those shoes away. Same goes for the DVDs and books you toss on the table after use. Put them where they belong.

"If you don't do that, two weeks later it's a big job," Marlowe said.

And if you have one of those big jobs on your hands, then now is the perfect time to purge.

The kids are going back-to-school. It generally feels like it's too hot outside to breathe. So turn your attention to the organizational needs inside your home.

Most people have some chaos to contend with. The National Study Group of Chronic Disorganization classifies disorder as potentially chronic and situational behaviors.

What Marlowe and Adele Gross, a professional organizer who owns At Your Service in Athens, commonly witness are cases of pure procrastination. The resistance to routine chores like facing the mound of paperwork or bills can get in the way of life.

"People mentally tell themselves 'I'm going to do this later, do this later,' and later never comes," Gross said. "A lot of it is not taking the time to do the mail. It piles up."

She finds reasons differ for peoples' delay. Creative-minded men and women are drawn impulsively to their own interests and put off, or are just plain bad at, the more structural talents of filing, categorizing and organizing. Other people are so busy they don't want to take the time to manage the finances.

Having a streamlined system in place is critical to keeping the steady tide of personal business flowing. Professionals do this after extended question and answer sessions ahead of time."Think about how you think, work, live," Marlowe said.

She used one client's habit of tossing all the business cards she collected at work into big plastic tubs. To put the information into a filing or Rolodex system would've taken her too long. So, Marlowe simplified the process by categorizing a series of smaller containers into subjects.

That way her client could both sort and relocate the cards by subject and therefore save time.

But while categorizing is a good tool and in the woman's case made sense, don't think buying more and more containers is the automatic way to do this.

"I've found through experience the more containers people have, the less organized they are," Marlowe said. "It's more important (to know) what needs to be organized and what kind of systems can be put in place."

Marlowe and Gross first look to what's available in the house to help organize, as opposed to new purchases. They also address the major, and often emotional issues, related to what is unnecessarily being stored in the home as a way to help their clients declutter. Most people have trouble throwing things away, they agreed.

"People think if someone gives you something as a gift, it will offend that person if you get rid of it," Marlowe said.

"We keep all kinds of stuff."

That's where the toughest decision making comes into play. Both organizers suggest people ask themselves how they use items. If the answer is not at all, then they have to prioritize.

Marlowe suggests whittling memorabilia down to the very best examples of whatever it is they've stored. Keep the christening dress, or the very best homemade holiday cards from elementary school, for instance.

Frame them. Display them. Or, better yet, give them to whomever they belong to.

"Some people are afraid to ask their kids, 'Would you like to have it?'" Marlowe said.

If the answer is no, then the person housing the memorabilia has their answer.

If the answer is yes, the item is gone.

"Not dealing with it means you're just keeping it to throw away," she said. "Again, you have to corral it. What most people do is put something away, forget about it and it's not being preserved."

What is being preserved today - too much so, in some cases - are the digital photo images that are replacing prints, which also proliferate.

Whether on paper or on the hard drive, photos cause people to hit the brakes when it comes to tossing them out.

Not editing down stored photos creates both digital and paper clutter.

What Gross advocates her customers do is use online and often free image storers such as or for digital images. That eliminates any chance the files will be lost because of a computer failure.

For those who have boxes of prints, Gross suggests making the commitment to categorize, similar to how Marlowe handled the business cards.

"The first thing they need to decide is how they want to categorize their photos, by child, by person, by year, by vacation," Gross said. "I recommend photo boxes."

Again, though, she warned against the impulse of buying more and more containers.

Be particular about the system you install.

"This myth, if I buy some products (containers) then I'll overnight, automatically be organized forever; it takes maintenance," said Gross, who admits to having clients that hire her to maintain their organization, too. "That's what I tell everyone, too. I kind of give this disclaimer, 'I'd be happy to work with you, we'll set up a system that will work for you, but ....

It's up to you to keep it," she said.

About the children's room

Athens home organizer Julia Marlowe advises people include their children in the process of getting organized and staying that way.

Although it may be easier and quicker for parents to clean up the toys themselves, they are not doing their children any favors in the future, she said.

Consider how quickly capable children are when it comes to clean-up time with this dramatic example:

"One client bought a basic (shelving) piece from IKEA and turned it on its side. The kids were trained to put their toys in baskets, didn't matter which ones. What they did not put in the baskets were thrown away (at the end of the day)," Marlowe said. "That's pretty extreme. But her kids put their stuff away."

Find more tips from Marlowe at


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