I’m a professional organizer, and I beg you, please don’t organize first

The term professional organizer has finally started to resonate with the public. Once a profession that people had never heard of has increased awareness thanks to famous professional organizers like The Home Edit, which is taking the world by storm with its rainbow color-coding style. Professional organizers were once relatively unknown; now, our industry is on the rise and more recognized.

While as a professional organizer I’m grateful for the industry attention, I don’t have much in common with those famous professional organizers.

My approach is unique because I don’t look, act, or work like most of my professional organizing counterparts. I’m high on the loud-laughter scale, have tattoos, and don’t prioritize organizing in my client process.

Let me explain my obvious click-bait statement: my mission is to increase time and space freedom for overwhelmed women. I see many women being held back by their homes and sacrificing their time and well-being for others. It’s making us sick and keeping us from being in our zone of passion.

The Rock Star Residential approach stems from a motivation to use professional organizing to decrease overwhelm and increase space and time freedom, not to make a perfect museum-quality environment.

    Here are the two areas where we focus on getting our clients big wins with our professional organizing approach:  

• We encourage them to declutter as much as possible. We help them remove anything from their life that is not adding value by being loved, needed, or used.
• We help create systems and habits to automate how things run in our client’s households.

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We will focus on functional organizing in the middle of those two steps. We are functional organizers because we are neither skilled nor interested in designing or putting your chaos in pretty containers. That chaos will breed and seep out of those cute containers like some ominous cloud in a bad horror flick and take over your space again.

    So we focus on helping you through our professional organizing system by:

1. Asking you about your end goal and getting clear on that vision.
2. Define the key activities going on in your space.
3. Designing zones for your key activities.
4. Categorize your items and put like with like.
5. Decide if containment and labeling benefit this unique space and goal (see how that is the last step?).

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We don’t start with buying bins and baskets. We always start with reducing what you don’t need, want or use. Then we do a lot of work around how you use your stuff. Containment is last on our list. Unfortunately, buying organizing products has become synonymous with organizing, to the detriment of all those who want a better functioning environment.

My school of thought is that if you only have what you need, love, and consistently use, then you don’t need to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on racks, bins, shelving units, and other space-maximizing systems. My mission is to simplify your life, not encourage you to buy more stuff to store.

An additional issue with the organizing step is that it is a fast fix or band-aid to the root cause. We run out and buy a beautiful bin to put our stuff in because it feels good when we buy that item (thanks dopamine hit), and we think we just solved all our problems.

What we need to do first is PAUSE; do some work around your mindset and clutter issues. If you skip this vital step, I fear the ominous clutter cloud will be coming for you soon.

Now there are exceptions! You may need to focus intensely on organizational systems, for example, if you have multiple children or live in a small home. I’m not anti-organization; I’m just not in love with it as a stand-alone practice.

Don’t despair or shame if you find yourself in the “buy the bin and solve all the problems” camp. It’s crazy normal! Almost everyone I work with ends up with a “container graveyard” they donate after working together.

I advise you to do some mental work around WHY you have too much and also do some work around WHAT is holding you back from releasing it; then start letting go. Just focus on letting go until you can’t let go anymore. Then evaluate how to organize.

May your ominous cloud disappear!

If you would like a professional organizer in your corner that doesn’t push for purchasing products over solving the core issue, we would love to offer you a zero-pressure consultation. 541-610-7810