NYC Professional Organizer Advises on Closet & Paper Organizing

I was featured in the Spring is the Perfect Time for a Closet Cleanse segment on closet organizing that aired on WABC-TV News in NYC on May 15. I was honored to have been asked to work on this closet organizing project by the NYC affiliate. My client is a single mom who lost control of her walk-in closet when her son started the college application process last fall and just never found the time to get it back under control. You won’t believe what we accomplished in just 4.5 hours…the before and after shots tell an amazing tale!

A couple of days before working on this closet, I had spent 8 hours working with an attorney in his NYC office organizing the significant piles of papers covering his entire desk. The end result for both projects was significant and was a direct result of the lightning-fast decisions that each client was able to make during the sorting process in addition to their commitment to getting their respective spaces organized.

I was well prepared to segue from the wall of paper to the wall of shoes as the process is the same.  In both cases, I asked the clients to define their objectives and then I implemented a very systematic approach for achieving them.  For example, we started with the pile of clothes on the floor in the closet as a safer work environment was needed, while the starting point for the paper organizing project in the attorney’s NYC office was the pile at the very end of his desk.

The questions that I posed to each client as they were doing their respective sorting may have been tailored specifically to a pair of jeans (Do they still fit?) or an email printout (Can you get another copy if needed?). However, I was helping each client determine the relevancy of the item in question so that they could quickly decide whether it needed to be kept.

Once the excess clothing and papers were removed, I worked with each client to set up a system for maintaining their space. For the closet organizing project, my client and I determined the best location for each category of clothing/accessories so that she would know exactly where to put every pair of jeans, shoes or boots going forward. The paper in the attorney’s office was assigned to trays based on specific actions (in, read, to-do, scan, etc.) so that he could quickly sort all new incoming papers.  In each case, time (as little as 5 minutes a day especially in the case of the closet project) will have to be devoted on a daily base to maintaining the space.