What Does a Professional Organizer Do?
Clutter and disorganization can often leave you feeling overwhelmed and contribute to your stress. That's why organizing your stuff is much more than just aesthetics.
However, organizing your home and belongings isn't an easy task. This is where a professional organizer can help you. But what does a professional organizer do?
What Does a Professional Organizer Do?
A professional organizer can assist you with various tasks, including creating customized storage systems, decluttering with a specific goal in mind, maximizing available space, and more. We’ll delve into the details of all these and more to help you understand why hiring a professional organizer can be immensely beneficial.
1. Creates Customized Systems
If you think a professional organizer only straightens shelves and stores things right, you're wrong. A professional organizer:
Creates repeatable storage systems
Creates proper storage workflows
Teaches clients the habits and decisions that make organizing belongings easy
With repeatable systems for zoning, labeling, and storage hierarchy, a professional organizer actually makes it easy for their clients to store things in the proper fashion, even without their help.
The organizer helps clients store their belongings properly, regardless of their mood, stress levels, or other issues, to ensure their premises remain clutter-free.
2. Declutters With Purpose
A professional organizer steps in not just to declutter but to do so with a specific purpose in mind. An organizer evaluates on parameters like:
What's redundant
What's reducing the functionality of storage
Only after taking these factors into account does the professional organizer declutter, creating visual and sequence cues for their client to help them with storage.
Since they can declutter any premises and help clients maintain a clutter-free space in the future, they also assist in reducing clients’ stress levels. The reason is that numerous studies, like this one, have concluded that occupants who describe their home as cluttered experience higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Thus, organizers can also help reduce stress levels.
3. Maximizes Available Space
What might seem like a fully occupied storage space to an ordinary person might appear as an improperly filled storage space to a professional organizer. That's why professional organizers can maximize storage space. Apart from utilizing the existing space better, a professional organizer also helps you integrate new storage space solutions in your premises, like:
Vertical storage
Multi-functional furniture
Storage solutions with clear sightlines
Professional organizers play an even more important role in office spaces, as reducing clutter helps alleviate stress, which in turn leads to higher job satisfaction and productivity, making the benefits more tangible.
4. Simplifies Daily Routines
No matter how well the organizer organizes your existing belongings, if you can't follow such storage practices in the long term, your space will become cluttered again.
This is where most professional organizers shine. They not only help you store stuff, but they also transform your space in such a way that storing your belongings in the future becomes easy.
They do so by first analyzing your lifestyle and habits and then organizing your belongings. They take into account your habits and then create store zones. The aim is to create zones that provide visual cues for storage, making it easier to declutter your home even in the future.
5. Coordinates the Entire Process
A professional organizer doesn't just organize to get the before-and-after pictures. The organizer is involved in the process right from assessment to follow-up. The organizer plans the schedule, sources supplies, coordinates with cleaners, and ensures a smooth transition during the decluttering, sorting, organizing, and maintenance phase.
6. Coaches & Motivates
Professional organizers double up as coaches and motivational guides. That's because without the right habits, their clients will again mess up the spaces, and maintaining them will be a tall ask.
That's why they often coach their clients to keep everything organized and sustain the organization that they have achieved.
Organizers use evidence-based approaches to motivate their clients to change their habits and build commitment towards tidying up their spaces and maintaining them in that condition.
7. Offers Fresh Perspective
Homeowners and office owners often think they have already maximized storage space utilization, which is seldom the case. They need an objective view to organize their spaces better. That's what a professional organizer brings into the picture.
Moreover, for clients, every belonging is immensely valuable. Psychologists call this the endowment effect. It states that humans often overvalue items because they own them, and hence, decluttering is difficult for them. Organizers are not subject to this bias, and this is where their objectivity can be helpful. They can help their clients identify what is truly useful and what isn't. Based on this, decluttering becomes easier.
Types of Spaces Professional Organizers Work on
It’s a misconception that the services of a professional organizer can benefit only homeowners. That’s not true! We will cover all the spaces a professional organizer can work on.
1. Home Organization
Organizers can help transform cluttered, inefficient, or emotionally overwhelming homes into functional, calm, and aesthetically pleasing spaces. According to the LA Times, American homes contain over 300,000 individual items. Managing so many possessions leads to stress. Professional organizers can not only declutter homes but also help reduce the stress of homeowners.
2. Office Organization
As highlighted above, a cluttered space can lead to stress. In home offices and corporate workspaces, this leads to a loss of productivity, which can incur a significant cost for any business. That's why corporate workspaces can significantly benefit from the services of a professional organizer.
3. Digital Organization
Only a limited number of professional organizers offer digital organization services, but such a service has numerous benefits.
With everyone juggling files, emails, photos, and productivity systems, everyone's digital life is cluttered. Many professional organizers can also assist in this regard.
4. Move Management
Professional organizers can also assist you in managing your move. When you're moving into a new space, hiring a professional organizer from the start makes it easy to set up everything for maximum storage efficiency and create a decluttered space, which has a calming effect on most occupants.
Not only does hiring professional moving organizers during such a phase help with:
Planning move timelines
Handling possession inventory
Coordinating with movers
Designing unpacking systems
How a Professional Organizer Works?
Let’s now understand how a professional organizer works.
Step 1: Consultation & Assessment
Every organizer begins with the consultation and assessment phase, in which they study the client's environment, habits, and goals to understand what the client wants to achieve and how to declutter the space best.
Step 2: Planning & Strategy
The next step for any organizer is to create a roadmap that defines the scope of the organization, timeline, budget, and workflow sequence. Organizers often use product lists, visual sketches, and digital mockups to ensure the final setup can be executed seamlessly and is convenient enough for the client.
Step 3: Decluttering
During the decluttering phase, most organizers follow a scientific procedure, but it's an emotional and practical stage for the clients. At this stage, the organizer guides the clients through sorting, decision-making, and letting go of any frameworks they have been following so far. This is also the stage at which unnecessary belongings are discarded. Organizers often break large decisions into manageable steps that the clients can follow in the future as well.
Step 4: Sorting
After removing the unnecessary items, the organizer begins sorting. The sorting takes into account various factors, such as the function of the belongings, frequency, and ease of access. This is the step where they transition your space from chaos to calm. Sorting leverages the available space using various organizational principles to declutter any area.
Step 5: Organizing
In this step, the organizer sorts your belongings into a functional system that is convenient for you to follow. It also involves the organizer allocating your belongings proper storage space, like containers, adjusting shelf height, and so on. The aim is to make the storage system efficient and convenient for you to follow regularly.
Step 6: Maintenance
Organizing a space once is a relatively easy task. If the client cannot adhere to the organizational method or system, it ultimately becomes a one-time transformation rather than a sustainable lifestyle. This is where the organizer's experience comes into play. The organizer teaches clients how to build micro-habits, which can help them sustain the organization. This involves simple habits, such as a 5-minute nightly reset or a weekly put-back session, and so on.
The organizer also implements accountability tools, such as checklists and photo logs, to ensure the client adheres to these organizational systems.
FAQs
What is the 90/90 Rule for Closets?
The 90/90 rule for closets is a simple framework for decluttering clothes and accessories, based on which items you have used in the past 90 days and which you're likely to use in the next 90 days. Accordingly, the decision is made on whether to store, donate, sell, or discard the item. This framework helps remove any emotional attachment to the items, allowing for more effective decluttering.
What is the 1% Rule of Decluttering?
The 1% rule of decluttering encourages people to improve their spaces 1% at a time. Instead of spending hours organizing your stuff, it requires you to organize 1 small thing daily, so that your organizing efforts compound over time. The goal is to transform the space in the long term rather than in a single weekend.
Do Professional Organizers Clean the House too?
No, usually a professional organizer just creates systems, declutters, and optimizes space utilization. The cleaners do the dusting, mopping, and sanitation. Some organizers collaborate with cleaning teams to have things cleaned, but they don't do it themselves.
How Long Does It Take for an Organizer to Organize the Home?
Organizing a single room takes anywhere from 6 to 36 hours, depending on the room's size, clutter level, and the client's level of involvement. Accordingly, you can estimate the time required to organize the entire space. However, if the organizer has a big team, even the whole home can be organized in a couple of days.
Do I Need to Do Anything Before a Professional Organizer Arrives?
No, ideally, you should keep the space as it is so that the organizer can assess the extent of the problem and your daily lifestyle before organizing your home. This helps them design organization systems compatible with your lifestyle.
Organize Your Space Today
So, a professional organizer can not just transform your home by organizing your belongings, but also reduce your stress, helping you lead a more relaxed life. The organizer helps you develop healthy organizing habits, which can, in turn, help you lead a better life.
Need to organize your home? Instead of searching for the best professional organizer near me, drop me a line by clicking here to get started.
Sources:
https://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-keeping-stuff-20140322-story.html