
Organization. It’s one of the few common denominators between successful families, successful companies, and successful personal/professional relationships of any kind. Organizing a space means far more than tidying up a living room. Instead, it’s a form of protection — guarding your physical and mental space against the negative effects of clutter. Professional organization makes room for the things that matter.
Professional organizing is perhaps the most effective way to restore balance in a home environment. It can change your energy, daily disposition, and the way you relate to the space inside and outside your home.
Let’s explore the concept of professional organizing — what it is, why it works, and how the right professional organizing team can help you take back control of your space today.
What is Professional Organizing?
Professional organizing is the application of organizing principles to bring order and efficiency to a space. It’s meant to introduce purpose, clarity, and contentment into your life and into your space:
- Purpose: Professional organizing helps define the function of each space, ensuring that everything has its place and supports your daily activities.
- Clarity: By eliminating clutter and creating clear systems, organizing brings mental and physical clarity, making it easier to navigate and enjoy your environment.
- Contentment: An organized space fosters a sense of peace and satisfaction, reducing stress and helping you feel more in control of your surroundings.
Professional organizers take on a wide range of projects, often tailoring their approach to the specific needs of their clients. These needs can vary greatly depending on the situation, leading to distinct areas of focus within the organizing profession.
Mental Health and Executive Function
Some organizers specialize in helping clients manage extreme clutter, hoarding tendencies, or challenges with executive function, which involves planning, organization, and completing tasks. They often work closely with clients who may feel overwhelmed by their possessions or have difficulty creating systems that help them stay organized. These organizers bring order into a home and its residents’ lives while offering emotional support and purpose-built strategies to manage stress and anxiety tied to disorganization.
Aesthetics and Visual Branding
Other professional organizers focus on creating visually stunning, Instagram-ready spaces that align with a client’s aesthetic preferences. These organizers apply design principles to create clean, cohesive, and attractive spaces, often tailored for social media influencers, visual brands, or individuals who want their spaces to reflect a certain style. Their goal is to blend beauty with function, ensuring the space not only looks appealing but also works efficiently for day-to-day living.
Regardless of their focus, all professional organizers recognize the deep emotional connection that individuals have with their spaces and belongings. Organizers often work with clients to understand their relationship with their possessions, helping them identify what truly brings value and meaning to their lives. Whether it’s creating functional systems or curating aesthetically pleasing spaces, the organizer’s core mission is to help clients achieve a sense of purpose, clarity, and contentment in their environments.
Exploring the (Brief) History of Professional Organizing
Professional organizing is a relatively young profession, where different thought leaders offer different opinions on when, exactly, the discipline began. By most accounts, organizers began to define the professional organizing niche in the 1970s as a service distinct from related fields like house cleaning, interior design, and event planning.
While many people had been applying organizational principles for decades, it wasn’t until the early 1980s that modern professional organizing was more widely recognized as a formal industry. Though much of the work focused on goal-setting and productivity, Steven Covey discussed several professional organizing theories in his 1989 work The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
The 1990s and early 2000s saw further expansion in the field, with Julie Morgenstern’s 1998 book Organizing from the Inside Out exploring the connection between people and their possessions. During this time, television shows like Clean House, Mission: Organization, and Clean Sweep helped further popularize the distinction between interior design and professional organizing.
Many people today find professional organizing as a second career, often as an outlet to exercise skills in empathy, design, project management, and general problem-solving. Like many industries, professional organizing saw slow growth through the 2008 financial crash — but interest surged again with the rise of Marie Kondo’s KonMari method and her 2011 book debut, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
In reality, professional organizing can have powerfully positive effects for your most important physical, and mental, spaces.
What Does Professional Organization Accomplish?
Research continues to indicate that our internal state of mind and external environment are inextricably linked. Professional organizing recognizes and celebrates this connection, finding harmony between our physical spaces and interior state.
By transforming disorganized spaces, professional organizing yields several key benefits:
- Improved mental clarity: A clutter-free environment fosters a clearer, more focused mind.
- Increased productivity: With organizational systems in place, daily tasks are easier and more pleasant to manage.
- Emotional well-being: A well-organized space reduces stress and promotes a sense of calm.
- Enhanced aesthetic and functionality: A beautiful, functional space encourages pride and joy in your home or workspace.
When we organize our homes, offices, or personal spaces, we create environments that support productivity, relaxation, and positivity. This, in turn, helps to stabilize our mood and can even enhance our sense of self-worth. The act of organizing can also offer a therapeutic release, as letting go of unnecessary items often parallels releasing emotional baggage, helping us feel lighter and more centered in our surroundings.
What Happens during the Professional Organizing Process?
The professional organizing process begins with a conversation, typically over the phone, between organizer and client. This initial call helps to establish the client’s goals, set expectations, and determine whether the organizer and the client are a good fit.
Next, the organizer conducts an in-home consultation. This involves walking through the space, discussing projects, and determining areas that need attention. Some clients may have a single project in mind, while others might ask for help reimaging organization throughout the home. The organizer helps to prioritize projects with multiple objectives, balancing the client’s needs with their budget and time constraints.
Organizers often recommend starting in one of two areas:
- High-impact spaces: These are the main, shared areas of the home, such as the kitchen, living room, or entryway. When these spaces are functioning well, they positively impact multiple people in the household. If the person managing the home is feeling overwhelmed, their personal spaces, like their bathroom or closet, may also need to be addressed.
- High-importance spaces: These are the biggest pain points — areas that, if left unaddressed, will continue to cause stress and frustration. For some, this could be a hallway cluttered with unsafe obstacles. For others, it might involve financial wellness, like setting up a paper system to avoid missed bill payments.
Once a plan is in place, the organizer gives an estimate of the time and resources needed to complete the project, including the number of team members and organizing products required. Work is scheduled and a team of dedicated, positive-minded organizers arrives to transform the space.
Professional Organization: The Intersection of Art + Science
Professional organizing sits at a fascinating crossroads between art and science, blending the aesthetics of design with the psychology of behavior and the practicality of function. The goal of professional organizing isn’t just to make spaces look neat and tidy — it’s about creating environments that are both beautiful and highly functional, tailored to the unique needs and emotional well-being of the people who use them.
The Art of Professional Organization
The artistic side of professional organizing is rooted in applying design principles to make a space aesthetically pleasing. Much like interior design, professional organizers consider balance, color, flow, and texture when crafting spaces that not only work well but also feel inviting and visually appealing.
This aspect of organizing is personal and subjective, requiring organizers to collaborate closely with clients. A professional organizer must consider the client’s tastes, preferences, and lifestyle. This could mean integrating elements that “light up” the client — whether that’s incorporating favorite colors, matching the style of the rest of the home, or highlighting cherished objects. It’s about creating a space that reflects the individual’s personality and makes them feel at home.
The artistic approach doesn’t just involve beauty for the sake of beauty. An aesthetically pleasing space can have a calming effect on the mind, enhance productivity, and foster a sense of pride in an environment that’s as unique as each of our clients.
The Science of Professional Organization
With a focus on aesthetics, professional organization must also account for functionality, purpose, and emotional connection. Professional organizers don’t just declutter — they delve into the psychology of why we hold onto certain items and how we interact with our environments. This deeper understanding allows them to create systems that are both practical and sustainable..
The science of organizing is about uncovering what motivates clients and what emotional ties they have to their belongings. For some, clutter may represent unfinished tasks or unexplored emotional baggage. For others, it might signify a lack of time or a struggle with decision-making. Understanding these emotional connections is key to helping clients make lasting changes.
It’s not enough to simply remove clutter; professional organizers help clients examine their relationship with their possessions and help them find authentic joy in their release.
By merging the science of emotional connection with the art of an aesthetic space, professional organizers help create scenes — and people — that are healthy, productive, and joy-filled.
Make Room for Professional Organizing
An organized space is sometimes the quickest distance between a busy world and the mental clarity you need. Our professional organizing solutions restore beauty and order to the spaces you care most about. In restoring your physical spaces, our organizing team also helps restore peace of mind, replacing stress with mental clarity, confidence, and the right kind of positive energy.
We work with individuals, partners, families, and children as young as four. Partner with Abundance Organizing to delegate the organizing process and reclaim your living space.