I had seen her car in our neighborhood for years, with its sign: “The Professional Organizer: For Your Peace of Mind.”  

How nice it would be to have someone come and help me organize, I always thought, and then kept walking to the mailbox or chasing the kids.  But, last week, as I looked around at the baskets of papers in my home office that had been there for a good year—and the baskets of laundry on the floor that had been there a good, um, while—I thought, I am losing my mind, and I really do need help! 

To live consciously is to live simply, to live without clutter in our environments or our minds.  This I know, on the deepest level.  And, yet, my house (and thus, my mind) are not exactly on par with this understanding these days.  In fact, the birth of my second child almost two years ago seems to have brought a level of clutter to my surroundings that I haven’t seen since my adolescent bedroom. It does not fit with how I want to live now, as a grown-up aiming for a simple lifestyle. 

So, I picked up the phone and called my neighbor The Professional Organizer, whose name is actually Vicki Tripp, and asked her to come over. We scheduled a time for a few days later, and in the meantime I called some of Carlsbad’s other professional organizers to ask them about the bigger picture in their profession.

A great phone chat with Jan Davis, who owns ClutterBye and is the president of San Diego’s chapter of the National Association for Professional Organizers, validated that I am not alone in my desire for simplicity, nor my frustration with clutter. 

“With the economic restructure, people are really wanting to simplify more than ever,” Davis told me. “I think that’s where we’re headed in our quest to change things as a society. People don’t want to see the excess in their homes anymore.  They want to shed all of the stuff.”

Davis said she is getting many more calls from people who want their entire house gone over and de-cluttered.  “It used to be more about one room, or an event coming up, but now I am hearing from people with no deadline, who just want to simplify,” she said. About 99 percent are women, she said, and many more mothers of young children than ever before. 

What Davis tries to do is help her clients “downsize to a reasonable amount, without regrets.” She, as well as the other organizers I spoke with, likes to start with the area that is most frustrating and make progress there first. They all also have backgrounds in corporate project management or event management—“detail work”—that they parlayed into their home organizing businesses.  They all work with different donation and recycling agencies to move stuff to more suitable places. And they all seem to enjoy working with people, helping them with their challenges in their most personal settings.

“Sixty percent of what we do is psychology,” Davis explained. “I find it is very much about what my clients need currently in their lives, instead of what they thought it would be—what is important now, what is reality—not the big house they thought they’d have ‘someday’ and are saving stuff for.” 

Dennika Maly, owner of D-Clutter, sees her work as directly related to helping people live happier lives. “It definitely does help the environment to live more simply,” she said. “But most important is making life easier for people. It is amazing to see how relieved they feel when we are done.” 

As I spoke with these professional organizers, and prepared for my meeting with Vicki, I found myself nodding in agreement. Live in the now, not the someday: yes.  Feel relief in the clearing out and purging: yes, yes. I found myself excited for my meeting with my neighbor, eager to see what she would say. 

So, I forced myself to not neaten up before Vicki arrived, wanting to let her see the true state of chaos that often has accrued by dinnertime with two small children at home all day. She walked in and looked around, asking pointed questions, no nonsense, scanning with thoughtful eyes. I was like a patient waiting for a diagnosis: “So, what do you think?” 

“You need an organizer—or a group of really good friends!” she said. I laughed and told her most of my local friends have small children, too, so they have their own hands full and clutter to deal with. She quickly pinpointed the areas of our home most in need of immediate help: no surprise, the office and the laundry. We need some organizing systems.

She said my husband’s and my clothing and shoe collection was already “minimalist” (which is a high compliment to those on the simple living path) and organized enough, but the kids’ craft area and closet could really use some help as well.  She told me that anywhere from two to eight hours could probably get me to where I feel much less crazy in my space.  At her rate of $50 an hour, that would be somewhere between $100 and $400. A fair price to pay for peace of mind? 

So, could we just do this organizing ourselves? Yes, probably. But, have we—will we—do it ourselves? There’s the rub. As I ponder these questions and decide how to approach my own organizational issues, I go back and watch one of my favorite online videos, The Story of Stuff. I think again about how much our American cycle of consumption has cluttered our lives and our planet, and how peace of mind is so often linked to less, not more.  

Can professional organizers really solve our mass consumption problems?  Perhaps not, but they just might be able to help clear some of the clutter, one home at a time—and I’d say that’s a noble start.