Disorganized? Call in a pro

With more hectic lives, people seek help getting it together.

By MICHAEL KRUSE, Times Staff Writer
Published January 30, 2008

When professional organizer Chasity Poe, left, first began working with Karen Farrington last March, they worked at Farrington's home every Friday. Now that Poe has moved to Virginia, they do "maintenance" work via telephone.
	[Mike Pease | Times (2007)]

ADVERTISEMENT [Mike Pease | Times (2007)] Chasity Poe, standing, assists Karen Farrington with organizing her home last August. Poe is a professional organizer, helping clients organize homes and offices.

LAND O'LAKES -- Before: chaos.

After: peace.

This is a story about one desperate woman, the professional organizer who helped her, and the American cultural and commercial context in which that came about.

Not quite a year ago, Karen Farrington, wife, mother, full-time event planner, felt like she had too much to do, too little time and not enough order in her busy life. So she hired professional organizer Chasity Poe. She liked having Poe's guidance so much that she still works with her, even though Poe recently moved from Wesley Chapel to Bland, Va., which means they now must "meet" by phone.

Poe, Farrington said, didn't just make her make labels and pick stuff up off the rug.

"What Chasity's been able to do," she said, "is give me some clarity."

Now is a good time to talk about this. January is national Get Organized Month. It's true. Such a thing exists. Not just a day. Not just a week. A whole darn month.

Some might say we need more than even that.

We work more than we ever have, all the stats say, dishes pile up, mail piles up, e-mail piles up, and there's just no time, what with soccer practices and violin lessons and cocktail parties, and so we hire people to do things like walk our dog, do our grocery shopping and pick up our dry cleaning.

The National Association of Professional Organizers, based in Mount Laurel, N.J., started in 1985. It had 16 members. Now that number is 4,200, and counting -- membership has doubled in just the last three years.

Professional organizing is a multibillion-dollar industry that includes TV shows like HGTV's Mission: Organization, Web sites like organizedliving.com and a growing anticlutter army of entrepreneurs with filing fetishes.

The whole movement has gotten so big it's spawned its very own devil's advocates. David H. Freedman and Eric Abrahamson wrote an ode to disorder, A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder -- How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place.

See?

Even the title is messy.

Here's a random collection of factoids that seem to add up to say something that's probably worth considering:

• Three-fifths of Americans say they're too busy.
• Eighty percent of what we keep we never use.
• We wear 20 percent of the clothes we own 80 percent of the time.
• We waste 55 minutes a day -- that's 12 weeks a year -- looking for things we can't find.
• In 1982, there were about two dozen document shredding companies; 20 years later, there were more than 500.
• Ikea did a survey a few years back, and 31 percent of the customers who were questioned said they were more satisfied after cleaning out their closets than they were after having sex.

We clearly have issues.

"More than ever, in our society, we're in a place where people have more things and more space than ever before," said Standolyn Robertson, a professional organizer in Waltham, Mass., and the president of NAPO. "They need help organizing it."

In Tampa Bay, at least according to a search on NAPO.net, there are 24 professional organizers within a 50-mile radius around Land O'Lakes.

One of them is Betty Rosenzweig, who lives in Hernando, in Citrus County, and color-codes her sock drawers.

"A lot of people just don't have the time," she said. "They get overwhelmed."

Kate Newcomer, who runs her organizing business out of her home in Odessa, across the line into Hillsborough County, says tidiness is a choice.

"You decide you like it that way," she said.

"I learned to do it. Now I can teach other people to do it."

For Farrington, the last five years were full, and at times frazzled, too: She built up her business, she moved three times, she adopted her daughter and she was diagnosed with diabetes.

"What I found is that I wasn't able to get order in my life," she said. "I had so much going on. I was being pulled in a million different directions."

She started working with Poe last March. They met every Friday afternoon. They went, methodically, from the home office to the garage to the bedroom closet to her daughter's room to the living room, sorting, prioritizing ... purging.

Bye-bye, Kathy Smith yoga DVD.

Hello, labels, everywhere: RECEIPTS, COUPONS, RETURNS, ELECTRONICS, SEASONAL, TAXES, DIABETIC SUPPLIES, CLEANING SUPPLIES, VASES, POOLWARE, PLATES, PLASTICWARE.

Bye-bye, old periodicals.

"I can probably purge some of these magazines," Farrington told Poe in a visit last summer.

"This trash bag is getting heavy," Poe said.

Farrington stopped at her stack of Real Simple magazines.

"I might not be able to part with those."

"When do you read your magazines?"

"When I'm on the treadmill."

"But do you re-read them?"

"No," Farrington admitted.

"You're getting so good," Poe told her, "you might not need me."

"No way," Farrington said.

Now, on the phone, which happens once or twice a month, it's mostly what they call maintenance work.

"Really, on the phone, it's more about accountability," Poe said from Virginia. "It kind of helps keep her on track. Everybody needs an accountability partner."

Farrington, meanwhile, talks about her new, organized way of life with words like "strategically," "efficient" and "peace." She says she has more time. She says she's "in alignment."

"Everything has a home," she said.

News researcher Carolyn Edds contributed to this report, which used information from Newsweek, Agency Sales magazine, the Denver Post, the Calgary Herald, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or (813) 909-4617.

[Last modified January 29, 2008, 22:07:03]