What is a Professional Organizer, Anyway?
With the incredible explosion of organizing TV shows, books, and magazine articles, many people are taking active steps to combat clutter and disorganization in their offices, homes, and lives. Often, the easiest and most effective way to get organized is to work with a Professional Organizer – a trained expert who is dedicated to helping you meet your organizing and productivity goals.
According to the National Association of Professional Organizers (with nearly 4000 members, it’s the industry-leading membership association), a Professional Organizer helps people take control of their surroundings, their time, their information and their lives by training them on organizational principles, techniques and products. We don’t just help you “clean up” - instead, our work includes developing strategies and systems to meet your organizational challenges, and helping you learn the skills to keep up the systems on your own. Professional Organizers come from a wide variety of educational backgrounds and their skills and experience vary widely. For most of the field’s 20+ year history, many organizers came out of the corporate world, where they previously may have been in systems administration or administrative/office manager types of positions; now, it’s increasingly common to see newcomers to the profession choose organizing as their first job.
While many organizers are generalists and work in a variety of home and office settings, many find a niche within the field and serve a particular subset of the population. Some organizers specialize in areas like estate organizing (dealing with the belongings of the deceased), financial organizing (setting up bill payment systems, managing tax-related paperwork, etc.), or working with seniors (downsizing or preparing to move to assisted living). Others may focus more on productivity, including time management, organizing digital information, going paperless, and so on. One of the areas I specialize in is working with businesses and entrepreneurs, who often need systems developed to manage their businesses flow of information.
On TV, organizing shows often portray the Professional Organizer as a taskmaster, forcefully “encouraging” clients to get rid of their stuff and chiding them when they don’t want to let go (hey, it makes for good TV). In extreme cases such as hoarding, you’ll see the organizer give the camera quizzical looks when digging through a client’s amassed “treasures.” In reality, we usually help clients look at what they truly value and what they don’t – and what they don’t value might go away. For what stays, we’ll help them develop storage strategies and systems. If you really want to keep Grandma’s broken pie plate and the resumes from when you were 22, it’s my job to help you find the most effective way to store them.
Choosing the right Professional Organizer is important – this professional will be working with you in your own home or office, and will see things that most other people may not see. When choosing a prospective organizer to work with, it’s important to find out about their education and professional experience, as well as whether they have any ongoing professional education related to organizing. Ask for references or testimonials from other clients who have similar situations, challenges, and goals as you.
A typical session might start by identifying what project we’d be tackling during the session – for instance, setting up a digital filing system or editing one section of an office closet. We’d then work side-by-side on actually doing the work – setting up digital notebooks and notes in a tool like Evernote, or reviewing the contents of an office storage closet and deciding what to do with each item. Finally, we would end by reviewing what we’ve accomplished and what the next steps might be.
Pretty organized, right? Well, that’s the idea. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, disorganized, or maybe that things just aren’t working as well as they could, working with a Professional Organizer could help you bridge the gap between how things are, and how you’d like them to be.
Joshua Zerkel is Evernote's Director of Worldwide Account Management and Training, a Certified Professional Organizer, and is the author of the best-selling book "Evernote at Work."