Reaching the truth about what you value in life is one of the most powerful ways of knowing yourself, your stuff, and your space intimately. By knowing what you truly value in life, you will know how to organize all that you own. Desiring a creative and simplified way to get yourself and your space organized is a normal response to living with clutter. Yet the life you want to lead — full of activity, fun, and purpose — is more important than being a weary and downtrodden clutter caretaker. You want to declutter with grace and dignity — and with a professional flair instead of feeling embarrassed and flustered.
Typically, the fluster and frenzy heighten when you want to find something important before walking out the door, and it’s nowhere in sight, making you late and anxious. Or you struggle with an inadequate, failing system of disorganized, ever-growing piles. To stay calm and functioning, day to day, you find yourself hiding your stuff, shoving it in drawers, moving it around, and storing it haphazardly — but you know this is not how to live with the stuff that you love. The round and round “human in a hamster wheel” behavior of going from clutter to clear and back to clutter is exhausting. It tires you out and makes you itch for more things to covet, instead of appreciating what you already own.
From my perspective, getting organized is not about cleaning up a closet or a pantry. It’s about analyzing the causes and personal challenges associated with cluttered and disorganized environments. Realizing that outer space is a reflection of the inner self helps motivate people to look deeper for the cause of clutter. When a person’s mood is off-kilter, it colors how their space will appear. Instead of living in a sacred and splendid space, they will end up living in a cluttered and out-of-control space. A cyclone effect within a home or workspace is often correlated with inner turbulence and commotion. The inner self will also influence how you look at what you own and how you feel about yourself and your appearance.
For instance, an outfit you loved a week ago will suddenly make you feel miserable, but it’s not the outfit that is causing your angst. Feelings come from your inner self, processing thoughts and formulating conclusions about your life. When the inner self is cluttered with self-doubt and insecurity, even the most elegant clothing won’t inspire feeling confident or beautiful. Your inner state can blind you to the beauty of life and all the things that you love. Since inner, emotional clutter will trigger physical clutter over and over again, it’s important to first declutter your emotions and your thoughts. This begins with understanding and articulating what matters to you most. Then and only then will you be able to move forward with the Clutter Remedy strategy. The strategy gives you well-thought-out and specific criteria for all the objects you own, and it helps you become decisive and make good decisions about what to keep in your life. The clutter surrounding you has more meaning than you realize. Matter matters. It has energy, deeper meaning, and charge.
I meet with people regularly who consider their clutter a “secret.” Their closest friends are not allowed to see their clutter or are sometimes not even invited into their homes. Some people remark that their excessive clutter or messy space brings on so much “confusion and derailment” that they’ve stopped enjoying life and feel desperate and isolated. Others share that they are what I call “décor challenged” with blank or overloaded walls, barren or cluttered mantels, and dated or misplaced furniture. However, most admit they have consistent and mild clutter challenges within their closets, drawers, cabinets, and garage, and they want tips for getting and staying organized. Some have overcollected for years with no idea what to do with anything, and they are caught up in the mire and muck, believing they are “tied” to it. Others have collected out of boredom and own doubles of everything with no space to store it all.
Ultimately you want to love your stuff and know that everything you own is in your space for a reason. You want to stop having a love/hate relationship with stuff. I know there are days of loving your stuff, your collections, your books, bags, clothes, shoes, jewelry, tchotchkes, and sporting goods, and other days the stuff takes over and becomes an irritant and you want to set it on fire or take an ax to it and bury it in the backyard. Remaining in love with your stuff instead of being at war with it becomes easier when things you own are in alignment with your ideal lifestyle. Then, everything you own will imbue the sparkle and radiance that is part of the inner you. You will shine in your space as much as your space shines back at you in its image of perfection.
Utilizing the creative, simple Clutter Remedy strategy in this guide, I will teach you how to declutter and organize all that you own, now and for the rest of your life. You will become a connoisseur and authority on how to get and stay organized. What does the Clutter Remedy process entail? On a practical level, it takes a commitment of time and some resourcefulness, though how much time depends on the size of your space, on the amount of stuff you own, and on your motivation to fulfill your goals. Yet the process is flexible and can be adapted to any situation and budget. Completing the entire process, from beginning to end, for one large room takes one to three days, while multiple rooms or an entire house could take longer. How fast it takes also depends on your preparation, your energy level, and sometimes the weather.
The Clutter Remedy strategy in itself is simple and easy to use, and once learned, it can be used regularly for effective long-term maintenance. When you make the effort to get organized in this way, it will save you time, money, headaches, and perpetual turmoil. The process teaches you how to live a finely tuned and categorized lifestyle, so that you will have easy access to everything you own, and everything you own will have its ideal placement.
In short, you start with an inner assessment, so that you identify what you truly value in life, then set life goals to achieve the things you are missing, along with clearing and healing any past challenges that are blocking you from getting and staying organized. You’ll learn a new way of communicating that will increase your motivation to stay organized, long-term. You then envision and plan your ideal space, and choose the optimal time to get organized. Next, when you start the physical process of getting organized, you arrange your organizing tools and containers, clear your space, categorize everything you own, use the Clear and Concise Criteria to make good decisions about what to keep, fine-tune your categories, and set up your space based on how often and where you use things. As you are quickly clearing your space, you will find things you thought were lost and gone forever — earrings, shoes, old letters, safe deposit keys, and more — and you will be surprised and shocked by laughter and tears.
In one to three days, you will know exactly how many umbrellas, blenders, and books you actually own. You will realize how many shoes, ties, and small electronic items you possess. Living a categorized life means no more “human in a hamster wheel” episodes with your stuff. Getting everything you own categorized and then ultimately fine-tuned is an eye-opening experience. It happens swiftly and efficiently. The adjustment to living clutter-free will be a defining and freeing moment in your life. It will happen with a zest of spirit for wanting order and a final and permanent resting place for everything you own. It will be an uplifting experience that will provide inner clarity and rhythm for keeping your space organized perpetually for the rest of your life.
I became a professional organizer because I love to help people. I also love to organize, plan, develop space, and decorate. Formerly, I was a social worker and psychotherapist in private practice. After seventeen years of practicing, I ran out of the analyst chair, and what did I do? I ran directly into helping people get organized. I found that I could create new and innovative ways to organize plasticware, paperwork, and any number of things. I had a knack for it and a love for designing spaces. Helping people create better lives for themselves was the icing on the cake. Being a professional organizer is my dream job, so I formed my company I-Deal-Lifestyle Inc., and I developed a highly integrative and precise way of empowering