Labelers Are All the Rage in the 5th Grade?

I got my eleven-year-old step-sister-in-law a label maker for Christmas. I was so proud that she wanted one. Of course, I think everyone should own one, especially aspiring young organized people.

I got this message from my step-mother-in-law (my step-sister-in-law's mom, in case you're having trouble with the wacky family titles).

I just had to tell you, you started a new trend in the 5^th grade of "Y" Elementary. Anybody who is anybody has a cool labeler like "A". (I am not kidding!)

Before I got to the words "cool labeler" I thought she was going to say "cool pink-and-blue knee-highs with the skull-and-crossbones-and-hearts" (I thought it was time for "A" to enter her cutie-punk-rock phase). But, I'm just as pleased to hear this news.

Yay! More Press This Week

Have you seen Triangle Home Improvement magazine? The pick-up points aren't quite everywhere yet so you may have to hunt for it.

This month they featured organizing. Check out the article, with ideas from yours truly.

Lots of press about organizing at this time of year.

Inspirational Quotes For Business (Not Someting I Actually Use)

A friend who helps me with marketing sent me this idea, presumably for my email sig or something:

A quote for your biz. :-)

As Yoda once said, "Off the floor up pick your stuff from, Young Jedi."

-Susan

And you thought I only blogged about serious stuff. I hope you appreciate a little Star Wars humor. I do.

Rebates are Designed With the Disorganized in Mind

I finally bought a new phone/pda (more on that later). Of course, there is a rebate. And of course, there are catches:

1. The rebate only applies if you sign up for the most expensive plan associated with the phone and a long commitment.
2. The rebate is for a Visa check card, not cash. The last time we got a phone from Cingular, this was also the case. I had forgotten. I also forgot that last time we had to jump through hoops to get the Visa card to actually work and had a couple of embarrassing moments trying to use it to pay for something and getting declined. And of course the Cingular people were no help. They claimed it was out of their hands. I don't remember exactly what we did to finally make it work, so I have that voyage of discovery to look forward to in 10-12 weeks. Just thinking about it makes my hackles raise.
3. Getting your rebate is a very complicated process--intentionally so, I'm sure. It's interesting that the salesperson actually filled out my rebate form for me and attached the bar codes from the box as well as the receipt. I checked to make sure he stapled ALL of the necessary pieces together and filled out the information correctly (he misspelled my street address). Then, of course, he put it in the big bag with all the other stuff they give you. Since this phone requires a learning curve, I had to root through all the stuff looking for manuals and startup guides. Fortunately I found the rebate form, which I had already forgotten about, hidden amongst a lot of other paper. Despite his help (which I assume is meant to look like good customer service), there are still steps involved:
   
1. Copy the form, receipt and bar codes.
2. Mark the date I'm mailing it on the copies.
3. File the copies under "pending".
   
4. Put a reminder on my calendar to check the rebate status in 10 weeks.
5. Address the envelope. For some, locating an envelope is difficult.
   
6. Go to the post office and get a tracking number? This seems like overkill so I won't do it--I've personally never had a rebate get "lost in the mail" like many other folks.
7. Mail it. For some, locating stamps is difficult.
   
4. The deadlines for filing rebates are roomy enough that following through and sending it off seems not-so-urgent. Most people, I'd imagine, never get the rebate sent in time. And there is no flexibility on the end of the retailer. Rebates are designed to work this way. Companies would lose too much money to be flexible.
5. It takes forever to get your money, 10-12 weeks. By then you've had to pay your credit card bill and cough up the extra $$ until the rebate "money" comes back.
   
6. The "money" they send usually has a pretty short shelf life. It often expires within a few months.

Sources online say that between 15% and 40% of rebates go unclaimed. I'm really surprised the percentage is not higher. Of course, in my line of work, I find rebate paperwork that has not been completed about 98% of the time. All of these hurdles are by design. I am sure of it. And folks with organizing challenges are the biggest prey.

Companies that offer rebates should be required to post their prices in a format sort of like this: "$399*************" or "(NOT REALLY) $399". Otherwise, I think it should be considered false advertising.

Be aware, when you make the purchase, of what is really involved so you don't get victimized.

You Can't Buy This Kind of Publicity

I've been working with a reporter from the Raleigh News & Observer for the last month, helping her with content for her article which finally came out Saturday...



You never know how you'll come across in the media. Back in August I was quoted for an article in Carolina Parent (the story isn't online) and I evidently used the word "stuff" way too much. Or at least I was quoted that way.

This new article is huge, the first whole page of the Home & Garden section plus another whole page, and has giant before and after pictures (I organized three spaces for them).

I'm very pleased with the way it came out. Though, who knows if I'll get any leads from it. I was in the N&O a year ago and didn't get a single hit from it.

Read the article here.

Nature Conservancy, That's What You Call Yourself?

While sorting through paperwork, junk mail and legitimate mail at a client's house, we came across these two envelopes. They are two separate mailings to the client--one was addressed to her old name, one to her new name. The address was identical.
Let's examine the features of this mailing:
1) "Waste Not?" Really?
2) "Want Not?" No, I don't want to get this junk mail.
3) "Address Labels Enclosed" These things seem to multiply when you lock them in a dark drawer with free address labels from other charities. Many clients are overrun with these things. They nearly never get used fast enough to keep up with the influx, if ever.And on the back:
4) Their tag line at the top reads "Saving the last great places on earth" while using twice as many trees as necessary. I doubt this envelope is made from something easy to renew like bamboo.
5) "Free Gardener's Tote Bag", probably your "gift" for joining. It looks useful but is typical of the kind of stuff I see crammed in closets because it didn't magically turn the client's thumb green. Just say no to freebies. If it's free, it's not worth having!
6) "One of the world's most efficient and effective environmental organizations". So efficient they sent the letter twice.
7) "Recycled Paper" One out of 7 isn't so great.

The production value of this mailing shows they've got some bucks so why can't their database delete multiple entries for the same address? Why are they buying mailing lists that might lead to this unintentional excess? I guess they're ok with cutting more trees to process this white paper, if they can get more donations. In this case it didn't work.

Get rid of junk mail by generating form letters at New American Dream. Fill out the form and pay a buck to the Direct Marketing Association to get off their lists. Remove yourself from ADVO's list. Or join Greendimes--for a dime a day they'll stop junk mail and plant a tree for you.

Now that I've scanned in those envelopes I'm going to drop them in my mixed paper recycling bin.

My Mom on Being Organized

On Friday, I talked to my mom--we have a weekly (at least) phone call. Friday I emailed her with the premise for this blog entry and some questions for her regarding being organized over the course of her life. Here's what I wrote, asked and commented on:

I just got off the phone with my mom who has just finished her spring cleaning. It's January 5th. It's not spring yet. Not even close. She also sends out her Christmas letter early enough that it beats everyone else's. The only person who sent their holiday card to me earlier was another organizer, and it didn't count anyway because this year she sent a Thanksgiving card. I have not sent any cards or letters for 2006...yet...and maybe won't at all at this point.

My mom is very organized, as is my Dad, and presumably I learned a good bit about organizing and being organized from them. So I thought I'd pick her brain to get her impressions on some things. She's really into genealogy so hopefully she'll find the family-ties aspect of these questions interesting.

Question: Where do you think your sensibility about being organized came from? Nature? Nurture? Somewhere else?

My Mom: My parents always insisted we keep our rooms clean, beds made, clothes picked up, etc. Every Saturday we would "clean house" as a family. I feel it was definitely nurture! As I grew to adulthood and married, we lived in a small trailer while your dad finished his Ph.D. There wasn't a lot of room, so I immediately put my "organize and simplify" into action. When we moved into our first home, after his graduation, the "habit" just seemed to continue. By this time I had one child and we began "pick up the toys and put them back in the toybox before daddy gets home" attitude. This continued when you were born.

Question: What compels you to be organized and how would you feel if you were disorganized?

My Mom: My oldest daughter swears it's obsessive compulsive disorder. For me, I think it's that I just accomplish more when I am organized. My home is organized so both your dad and I can find most anything within a few minutes - or at least know in which drawer, box, etc it might be. When I go on a trip, I begin planning months - even up to a year - in advance. To me, the "planning" of the trip is half the fun, but the practical side is that when I get to where I'm going, I usually am prepared with maps, "necessities", adequate clothing, etc. If I didn't plan in advance I feel I would most certainly forget something important and an item impossible to find on our travels. When I cook I like to know where all my utensils are so when I need one I can grab it. If I'm making a series of recipes I clean up after each one before starting the next just so I can easily reach all my supplies and utensils. I guess I go by the old motto "cleanliness is next to godliness" - especially in my kitchen.

My Comments: My mom has been planning a trip to Alaska and has booked every aspect of it the moment she could (some hotels/airlines only let you book a year and in advance and stuff like that) and is mostly paying for it with various types of "points/miles" systems.

Question: Were you organized as a kid or do you think people just didn't have so much stuff back then?

My Mom: As a child, I didn't have a lot of "stuff". Everything I had stayed in my room. Our toys were in our room when I was little, and we always had things picked up from the rest of the house before my dad came home. As I grew to a teen, I didn't have a lot of material objects. Yes, my sister and I had our records and record player, etc which we kept with the family records in the downstairs family room. Anything else, I kept in my closet or in my drawers. As I mentioned earlier, our rooms were expected to be clean and tidy before we left for school each day, so everything had it's place. But, I must admit, I had a LOT fewer items to deal with than my children or for that matter my grandchildren.

Question: When Tina and I were kids, were you as organized as you are now (spacewise and timewise)? I don't remember us being overbooked with extracurricular activities and things seemed pretty balanced. You always had/made time to make dinner and come to our activities. I assume that Tina's dust allergies had a lot to do with your housekeeping but I don't know for sure. Was there any difference in your level of organization pre- and post- Tina being diagnosed with allergies.

My Mom: When Tina was 2, we learned she had severe allergies. After many tests, we discovered mold, dust, cat and dog dander were some of the worse culprits. Our pediatrician informed me it would be necessary to clean the bathrooms daily, dust and vacuum daily (or pull out all the carpeting) and if I didn't remove them, I would have to vacuum the curtains weekly, after they were sprayed with a special product designed to keep down dust. So, yes, Tina's allergies played a BIG roll in my organizing the house and keeping things up. After she had been on shots for about 5 years and her allergies improved, I tried to back off the "daily" regimen. By that time I was working full time, was scout leader for either Tina or you for 7 years running, then when Tina started playing junior high basketball and volleyball and then you were in high school tennis, I tried to be at every game/match. Unlike many families of today, we always ate dinner together (unless, of course, there was an out-of-town game), but we seemed to always pull things off. I think being organized gave me the freedom to feel I could go to work, attend your games and tennis matches and still have the house a "home". Of course, by this time you and Tina were young adults and pretty much in charge of your own things - I basically just had to keep the house "clean". I often referred to the house as my "kingdom" and you girls' rooms as your "castles". I insisted my kingdom was picked up, but couldn't always assume the castles would meet my expectations.

Question: How do you figure that Tina and I turned out with different tendencies toward organization?

My Mom: I ponder this question often and have NEVER come up with an answer!

Question: Do you have any thoughts about why a few of our family members have/had serious clutter/hoarding issues?

My Mom: Your paternal grandmother had a serious hoarding issue, but I think it can be explained. By the time the "clutter" started, she was pretty much house-bound. Her only enjoyment in life was ordering things that she thought she might one day take advantage of "when she was better". I think it was her way of holding out hope for returning to a normal healthy life.

I have an elderly first cousin, that has serious clutter issues. She tells me her mother was always a spendthrift, so I think she became the extreme opposite, spending very little and yet keeping EVERYTHING ever purchased.

My Comments: I believe my grandma was in the Level 2 range on the clutter hoarding scale. The cousin is probably a Level 2-3. I haven't seen her house but have heard about it in detail from my mom.


And now for some fun ones:

Question: Which would be worse: someone reorganizing your pantry without your permission? or someone turning your pantry into pure chaos?

My Mom: I REALLY have trouble with chaos. I might not like the way someone organizes, but at least there would be a pattern to it.

Question: By what date do you send out your yearly Christmas letter and are you actually trying to beat everyone else by being first?

My Mom: I always try to send our Christmas letter out the day after Thanksgiving, after all, that is when the Christmas shopping season begins. (I do have one cousin I try to beat - we have a lot of fun trying to be the "first".) Once my Christmas letters are in the mail I feel the holiday season has begun and then I can relax and enjoy, knowing I've gotten them out of the way. It's the same way with Christmas presents. I really dislike shopping in crowds and not being able to get what I want as a gift for someone, so I start early. For example, this year, I was able to relax, bake cookies, etc. because by the first of December my Christmas letters were out, my Christmas shopping done and wrapped. It was so relaxing to really be able to enjoy the holidays and not be stressing out.


Thanks Mom!

Organizing Industry Backlash

So, I'm finally responding to the organizing industry backlash that started on December 21st with the publishing of the article, Saying Yes to Mess, by Penelope Green, in the New York Times. I'll say upfront that I have not read the book A Perfect Mess by Freedman and Abrahamson. I rarely pay hardcover price, especially for something that would only frustrate instead of entertain. Well, maybe A Perfect Mess would entertain me with its apparent fictional components and bias.

I have excerpted parts of the article so you'll have enough context for my comments.

IT is a truism of American life that we’re too darn messy, or we think we are, and we feel really bad about it. Our desks and dining room tables are awash with paper; our closets are bursting with clothes and sports equipment and old files; our laundry areas boil; our basements and garages seethe. And so do our partners — or our parents, if we happen to be teenagers.

This is why sales of home-organizing products, like accordion files and labelmakers and plastic tubs, keep going up and up, from $5.9 billion last year to a projected $7.6 billion by 2009, as do the revenues of companies that make closet organizing systems, an industry that is pulling in $3 billion a year, according to Closets magazine.

This is why January is now Get Organized Month, thanks also to the efforts of the National Association of Professional Organizers, whose 4,000 clutter-busting members will be poised, clipboards and trash bags at the ready, to minister to the 10,000 clutter victims the association estimates will be calling for its members’ services just after the new year.

Well, any PR for my industry is good PR, even if our clients are being referred to as victims. And speaking of PR, the authors publicist is earning his/her fee, given the precision of the timing (during Get Organized Month, January, when people make their resolutions to get organized) and magnitude of all this.

But contrarian voices can be heard in the wilderness. An anti-anticlutter movement is afoot, one that says yes to mess and urges you to embrace your disorder. Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat “office landscapes”) and that messy closet owners are probably better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts. It’s a movement that confirms what you have known, deep down, all along: really neat people are not avatars of the good life; they are humorless and inflexible prigs, and have way too much time on their hands.

I'm not inflexible. I thrive on a combination of structure and flexibility. I get depressed with too much structure and don't get anything done with too much flexibility. And, if I was humorless, I wouldn't have any clients at all. Also, I've never met a person with too much time on their hands.

“It’s chasing an illusion to think that any organization — be it a family unit or a corporation — can be completely rid of disorder on any consistent basis,” said Jerrold Pollak, a neuropsychologist at Seacoast Mental Health Center in Portsmouth, N.H., whose work involves helping people tolerate the inherent disorder in their lives. “And if it could, should it be? Total organization is a futile attempt to deny and control the unpredictability of life. I live in a world of total clutter, advising on cases where you’d think from all the paper it’s the F.B.I. files on the Unabomber,” when, in fact, he said, it’s only “a person with a stiff neck.”

I think I want my doctor to be organized enough that she can easily review my recent medical history in the 30 seconds she has before entering the examination room.

“My wife has threatened divorce over all the piles,” continued Dr. Pollack, who has an office at home, too. “If we had kids the health department would have to be alerted. But what can I do?”

You can hire an organizer to help you, and possibly help your marriage in the process. Although couples counseling is where you might want to start (I know my boundaries).

Stop feeling bad, say the mess apologists. There are more urgent things to worry about. Irwin Kula is a rabbi based in Manhattan and author of “Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life,” which was published by Hyperion in September. “Order can be profane and life-diminishing,” he said the other day. “It’s a flippant remark, but if you’ve never had a messy kitchen, you’ve probably never had a home-cooked meal. Real life is very messy, but we need to have models about how that messiness works.”

Of course I don't want people to feel bad--but many people cannot simply accept their mess and have it not affect them negatively.

Also, I cook something from scratch almost every night. I couldn't do it well or at all if my kitchen wasn't orderly and clean. In fact, I think this is the most important room to have organized if being healthy is a priority (it also helps if your exercise room is free of obstacles, but not everyone has an exercise room). Of course you have to get it messy in the process, but you complete the process by putting the kitchen back how it started so you can cook again tomorrow without impediments.

His favorite example? His 15-year-old daughter Talia’s bedroom, a picture of utter disorder — and individuality, he said. “One day I’m standing in front of the door,” he said, “and it’s out of control and my wife, Dana, is freaking out, and suddenly I see in all the piles the dress she wore to her first dance and an earring she wore to her bat mitzvah. She’s so trusting her journal is wide open on the floor, and there are photo-booth pictures of her friends strewn everywhere. I said, ‘Omigod, her cup overflows!’ And we started to laugh.”

I think it's useful for kids to create their own system of organization by a combination of learning from their own mistakes (trial and error is part of the process) and through the teaching of organizing skills (which are part of the life skills package). I figured out part of how to be organized on my own when I moved away to college and my mom was no longer there to pick up after me. Both nature and nurture contribute to a person's ability to organize.

Last week David H. Freedman, another amiable mess analyst (and science journalist), stood bemused in front of the heathery tweed collapsible storage boxes with clear panels ($29.99) at the Container Store in Natick, Mass., and suggested that the main thing most people’s closets are brimming with is unused organizing equipment. “This is another wonderful trend,” Mr. Freedman said dryly, referring to the clear panels. “We’re going to lose the ability to put clutter away. Inside your storage box, you’d better be organized.”

It's true that the organizing product industry is trying to make money, just like the authors of the book. Organizing consultants often tell their clients that expensive organizing products are usually not a necessity. We can prevent people from spending a fortune on products that aren't right for them.

Mr. Freedman is co-author, with Eric Abrahamson, of “A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder,” out in two weeks from Little, Brown & Company. The book is a meandering, engaging tour of beneficial mess and the systems and individuals reaping those benefits, like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose mess-for-success tips include never making a daily schedule.

Kinda scary, given his line of work.

As a corollary, the book’s authors examine the high cost of neatness — measured in shame, mostly, and family fights, as well as wasted dollars — and generally have a fine time tipping over orthodoxies and poking fun at clutter busters and their ilk, and at the self-help tips they live or die by. They wonder: Why is it better to pack more activities into one day? By whose standards are procrastinators less effective than their well-scheduled peers? Why should children have to do chores to earn back their possessions if they leave them on the floor, as many professional organizers suggest?

I don't live or die by any self-help tips. I am a procrastinator. I know that I am deadline-driven, am a recovering perfectionist and am more likely to accomplish something if I'm accountable to someone besides just myself. Knowing that I work best in this framework, I make things happen. I also assumed, when I got into this business, that other organizers would fit the profile described. But, once I got to know other organizers, I found out they are more like me than than not. I question whether he has ever actually consulted with or worked with a credible professional organizer. And, I can't comment on the children's chores comment, since I don't have any kids, but I'm pretty sure that a parent's job is parenting.

In their book Mr. Freedman and Mr. Abrahamson describe the properties of mess in loving terms. Mess has resonance, they write, which means it can vibrate beyond its own confines and connect to the larger world. It was the overall scumminess of Alexander Fleming’s laboratory that led to his discovery of penicillin, from a moldy bloom in a petri dish he had forgotten on his desk.

Obviously that worked for Fleming. There's nothing wrong with that unless he missed other opportunities in his lab that we'll never know about.

Mess is robust and adaptable, like Mr. Schwarzenegger’s open calendar, as opposed to brittle, like a parent’s rigid schedule that doesn’t allow for a small child’s wool-gathering or balkiness. Mess is complete, in that it embraces all sorts of random elements. Mess tells a story: you can learn a lot about people from their detritus, whereas neat — well, neat is a closed book. Neat has no narrative and no personality (as any cover of Real Simple magazine will demonstrate). Mess is also natural, as Mr. Freedman and Mr. Abrahamson point out, and a real time-saver. “It takes extra effort to neaten up a system,” they write. “Things don’t generally neaten themselves.”

The narrative of a person comes from their actions in life, not the landscape of their desk. Also, the authors clearly miss the point that neat does not equal organized and mess does not equal disorganized. It seems that the whole of his work is based on this fundamental misunderstanding. It does take effort to “neaten up” and create a system in the first place, but substantially less effort to keep it organized. He may not realize that all these years his attempts to “neaten up” were actually disrupting a system he unknowingly had in place, the system that someone else convinced him was a “mess”.

In the semiotics of mess, desks may be the richest texts. Messy-desk research borrows from cognitive ergonomics, a field of study dealing with how a work environment supports productivity. Consider that desks, our work landscapes, are stand-ins for our brains, and so the piles we array on them are “cognitive artifacts,” or data cues, of our thoughts as we work.

Yup. I can usually tell the difference between a disorganized desk and a working desk, even though, to the untrained eye, they may both look like a mess. Though, in my case and in the case of many people who call me for help, disorder on the desk is reflected onto our brains, distracting us and inhibiting us from thinking clearly, sometimes killing productivity entirely.

To a professional organizer brandishing colored files and stackable trays, cluttered horizontal surfaces are a horror;

Aha. The organizer he has worked with walked in with stackable trays. 99% of the time stackable trays are a no-no, in my book. And also considering that the professional organizer exhibited horror, it's clear the author hired the wrong one. There are organizers who don't know what they are doing, just like there are financial advisers who don't grow your money and lawn guys who scalp your grass.

According to a small survey that Mr. Freedman and Mr. Abrahamson conducted for their book — 160 adults representing a cross section of genders, races and incomes, Mr. Freedman said — of those who had split up with a partner, one in 12 had done so over a struggle involving one partner’s idea of mess.

A whopping 160 people and the method by which they were chosen goes suspiciously unquoted. I'm surprised that only 1 in 12 split-ups involved a mess. I see disorganization factoring into ½ to ¾ of my clients' relationship issues. Of course, my study is as unscientific as theirs and, again, disorganization and mess are not equivalent.

I also want to mention Freedman's comments on Marketplace on NPR the other day. He said:

For example, most peole would tend to think of Microsoft — and let's think about Bill Gates too — as sort of a rigid kind of company. In fact Microsoft is really a mess. Bill Gates is famous for letting his teams pretty much run on their own, and I think Microsoft in fact does a great job of taking advantage of mess. On the other hand, Steve Jobs at Apple, he's really famously a neat freak — he pushes his teams to finish right on time, he has very specific ideas of what he wants them to do. Of course, Apple has tremendous and very vocal fans, it really is very much the minority in the marketplace.

First of all, letting teams run on their own is a management style, not a style of mess. Second, which product, Microsoft or Apple, is actually better and more innovative in the minds of those creative people who are supposedly being persecuted in our neat-freak culture?

Read or listen to the rest of the Marketplace story. Also, listen to Kathy Waddill, a well-known professional organizer, try to simply explain that the authors' premise is faulty when she appeared on Talk of the Nation last week.

To conclude my thoughts, it's reassuring that my industry is actually well-known enough now that there can even be a backlash. There are still a lot of people who don't know that professional organizers exist. Hopefully all this buzz (paid for by the authors to their PR firm) will inform people who are tired of/from being disorganized that help is out there.