This month, I’m planning to make a bundle of money! Money that has nothing to do with my regular sources of livelihood.
I just learned about the possibility last week in an article in Bottom Line Tomorrow. Julie Morgenstern is the latest guru of organization, and I’m always a pushover for people who promise to help me “organize my life.”
Bottom Line’s interview with Morgenstern is called “Organizing from the Inside Out–Secrets of a Professional Organizer.” It’s a take-off on her recent book–“Organizing from the Inside Out: The Foolproof System for Organizing Your Home, Your Office and Your Life.”
Morgenstern has a strategy that’s as easy as 1-2-3.
- Analyze. Figure out where you are, where you want to go, and how badly you want to get there.
- Strategize. Form a plan for your physical space and a schedule for implementing the plan.
- Attack. Dive in. Follow your plan. Customize your space. And then the suggestion I like best of all–“Think of files and closets not as places to store things but as places from which to retrieve them.”
There you have it–1-2-3. And for a price, you can hire the nationally-famed Morgenstern or another professional organizer to do it all for you. That’s where the money I’m going to earn comes in.
The price is $50 an hour for home organizing. Up to $200 for large corporations. So I started figuring at $50 an hour.
Six closets at three-six hours apiece. To simplify things, I chose the average–4.5 hours. The total comes to $1,350. And that’s just for the closets.
Eleven rooms–counting the storage rooms and the garage, which need organizing most of all–at one-two days per room. Again, I chose the middle point–1.5 days. The total–$6,600.
Add a few more extras–two days of needs assessments, three days for the office–and the total comes to a pricey $10,000.
There are scores of homeowners and corporations all over the country who are hiring experts to do their organizing at those prices. The reason is that our years of affluence and failure to organize have made us desperate.
We’ve discovered too late that more and more things do not enrich life. What we really want is simple, functional, uncluttered spaces for living and working.
When we look around and see how far we are from the goal, it could be tempting to hire someone to help. If we had the money, that is. But I think there’s a flaw in that thinking, and money is not the real issue. It turns out all that junk in your life . . . “is” your life.
It’s the story of the places you’ve been, the things you’ve done, and the people you’ve cared for. It’s six or seven decades of living. So why would you even think for one minute of letting a stranger into those sacred boxes?
Rather, creating order in your life is your job. It’s part of the process of living well and thoughtfully. So why not get started right now.
You could have one of the most fun times of your life, especially if you remember that “a penny saved is a penny earned.” And $10,000 is a million pennies.
Marie Snider is an award-winning health care writer and syndicated columnist.
