Home Organization: A Need, Not a Want

In 2022, I began the shift to a somewhat nascent profession: home organization. According to Jackie Tiani, author of Organizing for a Living, it didn’t even exist prior to 1980, making it younger than I am. She asserts that it arose and grew rapidly in response to a new need in our society stemming largely from economic pressures. When I read her description of systemic shifts that created new challenges in people’s lives and particularly in the home, I recognized myself and so many people I knew. It helped me understand why professional organizers are badly needed in today’s world, and why I am well-suited to join the field.   

Tiani writes, “Two-income families were commonplace [by the 1990s] and mothers who had taken jobs to supplement the family income became overwhelmed with the demands at home. Unlike their mothers, whose primary jobs were home and family management, these women were having to get their shopping and housework done in the evenings and on weekends.”

She continues, “With more available income, their lives filled with time saving conveniences, fashionable wardrobes, luxurious cars, expensive trinkets, and numerous toys to entertain their children. Along with these benefits came complications like commuting, parking, lunches, day care, and credit card bills. Instead of making their lives better, the extra income seemed to add to their problems. Rather than coming home to a retreat from their work lives, they discovered more and more chaos.”

This resonated with my own experience of being a household of two full-time, working professionals with young children. While we had everything we wanted, it was hard to keep all the balls in the air at once. Even when my career and childcare were demanding, I did my best to stay on top of high-priority chores. I regularly did laundry very late at night when I was completely exhausted. My husband and I gravitated toward different care tasks, but he was right there with me in the trenches of home work in addition to working full-time and co-parenting. It was such a slog.

Keeping on top of the house was important to my mental health. When the mess and chaos reached a certain threshold, my anxiety spiked, and I felt completely out of control until we stopped what we were doing and tidied up a bit. There were enough things in my life I couldn’t control, it was important that home base be a place of calm sanctuary. To me, that meant minimizing visual clutter, putting things away, “resetting” rooms after use, and keeping on top of dishes and laundry. For the most part, we succeeded, but lower priority tasks definitely fell by the wayside.

While we were mostly able to keep on top of the most basic, daily chores, I write in another blog post about our struggles with out-of-sight spaces and how I successfully chipped away at these over many years, as time and energy allowed. To this day, I still smile every time I walk into our little shed and can easily find what I need instead of being hit with a floor-to-ceiling wall of who-knows-what. Similarly, we are now able to walk around our cars in the garage without tripping over a jumble of items. Once we got thoroughly organized, which involved significant decluttering, it was much easier to return to a desirable set point when things occasionally got messy. This more encompassing form of organization revealed itself to be a quality-of-life issue for our family, but we were only able to achieve it once we had more time and energy.

Home organization is a quality-of-life issue for all families, whether they realize it or not. While personal comfort levels with mess vary widely, and there exists a wide range of inclinations and abilities to create organizational systems, ultimately, we all require a certain level of order in our home environment to function well. We all deserve a place to live that supports our ability to function in the world and be happy. This is something I am passionate about and interested in helping people achieve for themselves.

While busy people often hire cleaning or housekeeping service providers, yard services, or a handyperson to assist with odd jobs, many don’t hire a professional organizer until things have become intolerable. There seems to be an irrational belief that we should be able to declutter and organize our homes all by ourselves even if we are too busy, too tired, or disinclined to do it for whatever reason. I may be a professional organizer today, but it took years to get my home thoroughly organized because I was too busy and overwhelmed with other responsibilities. As the need and the profession becomes better understood and known over time, it’s my hope that people will turn to this helpful service early and often to achieve peace in their homes. There are many things we can’t control in this world, but our home environment need not be one of them.