Have you ever embarked on an organizing project, but midway through the project you lost steam, your momentum vanished and your excitement disappeared, so the project was never completed?

I recently started working with a client who’s lived in her current house for 30 years and is considering downsizing in the next year or two. For the most part, she’s been really decisive about what she wants to keep and what she wants to donate. However, occasionally she’ll say to me, “A friend gave this to me, but I never really liked it. Do you think it’s okay if I donate this?”

Pregnant with twins, my clients needed to figure out how to reconfigure their 1,400-square-foot bungalow to accommodate their growing family. A planned renovation was on the horizon, but it wouldn’t be happening for another year or so, so in the meantime, they needed to work with what they had, which meant adding a nursery to their guest bedroom/office space.

Future projections indicate that consumers in the U.S. will spend $9.4 billion dollars on home organization products in 2017. As a professional organizer, I’m completely on board with the notion of containing the items in one’s home in order to be able to find the things you need when you need them. However, when clients contact me for help with organizing, oftentimes they’ve purchased a number of organizing products, but their homes are still disorganized. When I work with clients, I often “shop” their house to find underutilized containers and baskets we can use when organizing their space.

One of my favorite parts of being a professional organizer is brainstorming with my clients to come up with innovative ways to create order, redevelop an organizing system, or discover a different way of using an item. Instead of running out to the store to buy a new product, which can get costly very quickly, I think about ways to repurpose a piece of furniture or how to use a container in a creative way.

When a client contacts me for help with an organizing project, they’ve often tried many times to get organized and haven’t been successful. By the time I speak with them, they’re frustrated, overwhelmed, and feel hopeless that they’ll ever get organized.

One of my clients moved into a 2 bedroom/2 bathroom condo four months ago, and the guest bedroom served as a storage room for all of the boxes she hasn’t yet unpacked. Frustrated and frozen as to how to proceed, she hired me.

In the span of three years, my client lost both of her parents and her husband. It’s now been five years and she feels like the mental fog has finally lifted, and she needs someone to help her get her house organized so she can put it on the market.

Oftentimes, my clients’ desks are covered with post-it notes and pages upon pages of notes and pens and paper clips and binder clips and important documents and unopened mail - plus their laptop or desktop computer and possibly even a printer - which translates to so much clutter. And all of the clutter distracts the brain and makes it difficult to focus on the task at hand, whatever it might be.

My clients had two junk drawers in their kitchen, one in their bedroom, and two in their office - that’s five total. In each those junk drawers was absolute chaos! Since they could never find what they needed when rifling through the drawers, they were constantly running to the store to buy various items.

The primary closet can easily become overstuffed with clothing. I recently worked with a client who struggled with this issue.

One of my clients had accumulated the equivalent of two closets full of clothing and squeezed them into her single closet. As we worked together, she managed to let go of about half of her blouses she didn't like or hadn't worn in years and freed up space in her closet.

Two years ago, before I started my business, I thought long and hard about a name that would best represent what I do. When I came up with the name “Live With Less” it really spoke to me the way I hope it speaks to clients who need my decluttering services.

Remember how it feels to be in love? The butterflies in the stomach, the anticipation and excitement of seeing him or her, feeling as though you’re constantly floating on air…. I still experience those feelings with my significant other after 12 years together!