Nikki Works with a Professional Organizer: Situational Disorganization
While she was looking for a PO to help her, Nikki found out that there were different types and levels of disorganization. Now she’s doing more research to try to figure out what type of disorganization she has so she can find the best Professional Organizer to help her.
For some people, disorganization is situational. Their lives have changed, but the ways they organize haven’t changed with it. Suddenly, they realize they are overwhelmed with clutter. The organizing systems they used in the past aren’t working anymore and they don’t know how to get things working again. Lots of different life events can cause situational disorganization, such as: a new baby, moving, combining two households, an inheritance of items that don’t have a place yet, or beginning to work from home. A PO can help adapt old systems to the current situation and get them working again.
When a client contacts me, I listen for the words, “before,” “I used to be organized,” “this new,” and “things aren’t working anymore.” These expressions most often mean that the client is situationally disorganized.
When I work with situationally disorganized clients, I start by finding out what is working. This lets me see the types of systems they know how to design and use. It also gives me an idea of the organizational habits they have used successfully in the past. With that information we can modify the systems that are no longer working, adapting them to their new life.
Nikki thinks that some of her clutter, like the things that she inherited from her Aunt Sue, is situational. She’s pretty sure that once she decides what to keep and where to put it those piles of stuff will go away. However, she doesn’t even know how the rest of the piles got there. She’s going to continue her research into the different types of disorganization.
In the next blog Nikki will investigate hoarding. She is pretty sure she is not a hoarder, no matter what Amanda says, but she is curious about what exactly hoarding is.
Copyright© 2020 Elizabeth Tawney Gross, Organizing For Everyday, LLC