Streamlining: ‘90s Answer to ‘80s Excesses : Lifestyles: Professional organizer Stephanie Culp tells people how to trim the clutter from their lives and carve out more time for relaxation.
Attention shoppers, harried, overworked, stressed-out workers and everyone in between: Stephanie Culp has some advice: Streamline.
What, you ask? Aren’t streamlines those silver bullet-like travel trailers? Or maybe remnants of an overused design fad from the Cold War ‘50s?
Guess again, says Culp, who didn’t mind, in the middle of the acquisition-crazy ‘80s, telling folks that “the key concept for the ‘90s is going to be streamlining.”
And she believes she was right. Perhaps to prove her point, she wrote “Streamlining Your Life: A 5-Point Plan for Uncomplicated Living.” .
The book essentially tells people who do not have much time to read or relax how to make time to read and relax, which may seen like a contradiction in itself.
The book is written in a general outline form, so that even the most frenzied among us can page to the specific problem on which they would like help from Culp, a professional organizer.
“The ‘70s and ‘80s were times of acquiring and getting,” Culp said by telephone from her Wisconsin home. “Now that people have done all that, they are looking around and seeing that they can’t keep up.”
Culp has written several other self-help books for people who want to organize their lives, and she does consulting work for companies and individuals (at $125 per hour, with a six-hour minimum, plus expenses) on how to manage paperwork.
She usually works for mid-size companies--insurance companies and law firms often ask her for help with their paper gluts--and wealthy individuals.
She is also a founding member and past president of the National Assn. of Professional Organizers.
The essence of streamlining, Culp says, is determining what a person does and doesn’t have to do.
“People say, ‘I have to do this,’ or ‘I have to do that,’ but the only thing you really have to do is die and pay taxes,” Culp says.
Another key element in streamlining is to imagine the consequences of a purchase. If a woman buys a silk blouse, the cost is going to be $100 or more. And each time the blouse needs cleaning, a trip to the cleaner is necessary. Another trip is needed to retrieve the blouse.
A polyester blouse, some of which appear and feel like silk, costs less and can be washed in a machine.
Most people don’t think about the consequences, Culp says, adding, “Everything we acquire exacts its toll on our time, our energy and our pocketbook.”
Compulsive collecting also exacts its toll. People might save every piece of paper or every pair of shoes an offspring might produce or wear, or another person might keep used parts around the garage or basement.
And most everyone falls into the trap of collecting, clipping and filing interesting articles that “they might need later.”
Culp’s rule of thumb: If you think you’ll need it later, you probably won’t. Keep only what you know you’ll need later.
Culp has taken her own advice. After years of battling the rat race in New York City and later Los Angeles, she moved to Oconomowoc, a small southeastern Wisconsin community.
“I wanted a better quality of life,” Culp says. “I was willing to give up certain things, to live on less, if necessary . . . to let go of the city excitement. A lot of people are hooked on that.”
So far, so good. She publishes a newsletter, Organizing News, and she’ll send a free copy to interested readers if they write her at The Organization, P.O. Box 108, Oconomowoc, Wis. 53066.
And, please, she says, don’t enclose any interesting articles for her to read.
Culp isn’t the only one concerned about the harried pace of life and our efforts at slowing down.
Jeff Davidson, a Virginia-based author, has written “Breathing Space: Living and Working at a Comfortable Pace in a Sped-Up Society.”
The author of 17 books on time management and motivational topics, Davidson realized several years ago, as a management consultant for a 40-person company in the Washington area, that life was becoming more and more hectic.
In a telephone interview, he said he “began to adopt new ways of looking at the world.”
Davidson began to realize that the time-management techniques he had learned and written about would not work unless the person began to look at the bigger picture.
Part of that picture is to understand how the information-based society in which we live affects our lives, Davidson says.
“The real battle takes place in your head,” says Davidson. “If you start the day thinking ‘I’m not in control,’ then you are not going to be in control.
“But if you start the day by saying, ‘Let me ground myself in the reality of today’s existence, and that reality is that all manner of things are competing for my attention and that I only have a limited number of days on this Earth’--then you will begin to be in control.”