Getting Organized:  It’s a Personal Decision

By Holly Uverity CPO®, Office Organizers

As I’m writing this, I’m about to enter my 23rd year of business; I started Office Organizers in June of 1993 with the intent to help new businesses set up their offices. As I’ve traveled down this path, I’ve seen great strides in the organizing industry itself.  Where now organizing is mainstream, it wasn’t always so.  In the early 1990s when I introduced myself, people thought I was a union organizer as they had no other frame of reference for the term “professional organizer”.  I spent the first five years of my business explaining what I did.  While the how of organizing has changed over the years, what has never changed for me is the why.  There are so many more resources, both in people and tools, available now than there were ever before but even so, getting organized is and always will be a personal decision. 

As I’ve said countless times, organization exists on a spectrum.  On one end live the people who keep everything and on the other end live the people who keep nothing.  As an aside, I’m not including hoarders in this spectrum as true hoarders suffer from a disorder.  My question to you is:  If organization exists on a spectrum, where do you live?  Are you one extreme, the other extreme, or in the middle?  And does it ever change?  My hope for you is that you are on neither end and that yes, it does change.  As your job, priorities, and your life changes, I hope that your organizational strategies change as well.  If you’ve always worked for someone else and now you’ve started your own business, wouldn’t it make sense that you’d have to re-evaluate everything you do?  From what you do to where you do it, wouldn’t it make sense that you move along that spectrum?