After repeated attempts to gain control of her home office, a client contacted me for help. She told me she didn’t know how to deal with her paperwork, and she was constantly searching for lost important documents in the dozens of piles strewn about her office. My client wasn’t interested in scanning the paper she had, she just wanted to get her paperwork to a manageable state.

Downsizing has become more and more popular as empty-nesters decide to ditch the suburbs to move closer to the city after their children have moved away. Oftentimes, empty-nesters also give up square footage when they move from a home in the suburbs to a condo or townhouse, which means they’re forced to evaluate their stuff to figure out what will fit in their new space versus what they can let go of.

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.

Bathroom storage can perplex the best of organizers. Personal care products take up space! I'm lucky because my bathroom includes a vanity with three drawers and under-cabinet storage.

This past weekend, I embarked on a project of epic proportions: I started to organize my digital photos. And it is truly epic. You see, I’ve got about 13,000 digital photos to purge, sort, and organize. Eeeeek!!! For years I'd been procrastinating, and I finally got to the point where I'd had enough of the procrastination. I just needed to get started.

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.

My client and her husband bought their home 14 years ago. They had planned to paint the walls and install hardwood floors soon after moving in, but 14 years later their plans are still on hold because she felt their home is so disorganized.

Any frequent-flyer has heard this message over the airplane loudspeaker a number of times: "In the event of an emergency, please put on your oxygen mask before helping others." Essentially, the message is reminding airline passengers to take care of their needs first, before helping anyone else who might be in trouble.

It's estimated the average adult makes approximately 35,000 decisions a day. THIS IS NOT A TYPO! 35,000 decisions! From what to wear to what to eat, from what route to drive to when to leave, it's no wonder we're exhausted every day! All of these decisions leave little time for the rest of our day-to-day existence.

Buyer’s remorse is real, and my clients often express regret about past purchases. They’ll pull out a leather handbag or a pair of shoes from the back of the closet or from a box on the top shelf, and ultimately they’ll cringe and tell me they dislike the item, but they’re keeping it because they spent a lot of money on it.

As a small business owner, I am faced with a lot of decisions every single day. Aside from my accountant who files my taxes every year, I’m not at a point where I need or want to hire someone to handle my bookkeeping, social media or writing. In all honesty, I love writing my blogs each week and I love getting feedback from my awesome blog subscribers as they read my weekly posts. It’s quite an ego-boost to know I’m impacting people and how they live.

Some of my clients are business owners who incur expenses when dining with clients. One tip I like to share in order to help them to separate the business receipts from their personal receipts is to encourage them to immediately to the following when they receive the receipt…

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.

In 2014, the average person celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, and/or Kwanzaa spent more than $750.00 on gifts and holiday decor. Many people feel stressed out as they try to come up with the perfect gifts to purchase for their family and friends. Ironically, a recent CBS News poll found that one out of three of Americans think they have too much stuff.

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.