There’s a Tidy Sum in Turning Chaos to Order
Everyone sits in a circle, support-group style. At first all you hear is the timer, ticking away the 15 minutes we’re allowed to spend on “Holiday Tips and Timesavers,” the first of five such subjects listed neatly on the blackboard.
Eventually people raise their hands, waiting patiently to be called upon. No McLaughlin Group wanna-bes in this bunch. Speakers usually begin by saying, “I have a comment,” or, “I’d like to add something.”
It seems for a while like a production of “No Exit,” directed by Heloise of helpful hints fame. Finally, the truth starts to emerge.
Catherine Layer, who works for clients in the entertainment business, sometimes makes house calls wearing rubber gloves, a dust mask and bug repellent. Nicole Ireland often brings her power tools. Tom Nevermann takes the trash with him when he leaves, lest any backsliding occur in his absence.
Despite such travails, the gathering is upbeat. They are a cheerful and orderly tribe, these members of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Assn. of Professional Organizers. And even though theirs is the largest chapter, they manage to get along without a lot of elbowing and jostling over the file folders.
And why not? Southern California is apparently prime turf for organizers. People here like consultants of all kinds, it’s an affluent part of the country and all these shopping malls result in a lot of personal possessions.
“We have too much stuff,” says Ann Gambrell, a founder of the association who lectures on getting organized. “And we want more stuff. We want everything, and when we get it we don’t know what to do with it.”
Besides, at $50 an hour and up, these folks can take solace in the tendency of entropy to increase. That the universe is a slob is good news to people with businesses named, say, “Space Invader,” or “Chaos Control.”
The timer keeps ticking. This is the Los Angeles chapter’s monthly meeting, at which some of its 77 members trade war stories and inside tips on getting organized and, equally important, making money getting organized. With the exception of Nevermann, all are women.
“Women are caretakers inherently,” says Stella Macey, a professional organizer from Santa Clarita who, suggesting an Anne Tyler character, urges clients to keep their spices alphabetized. Adds Nicole Ireland, the chapter’s energetic president: “It’s a helping profession.”
Apparently, an organizer’s life is no picnic. “Clients say they have file folders,” Ireland says. “But are they third cut? Fifth cut? Do you know what it’s like working with fifth-cut folders?”
Nevermann says he never goes on a job without his Brother P-Touch 3 label printer. “You can label your little heart out,” he says, but his beeper goes off before he can elaborate. Who knows, maybe a client had an emergency.
It can happen. Think of the Collyer brothers, those New York pack rats found dead 45 years ago in a brownstone filled with 18 tons of junk. Homer’s body was discovered immediately, but it took police 19 days of foraging to locate Langley.
The inability of clients to let go of things is a big problem. “We provide the emotional distance,” says Ireland, who reports later that, “One lady said, ‘OK, what do I do with this piece of the Berlin Wall?’ ”
Becoming a professional organizer attracted many of these women because they had already performed such functions in business, organizing offices, enterprises or demanding bosses even as they juggled the demands of home and family. Besides, it takes almost no capital.
Perhaps predictably, the organizers already in the business are getting ready to erect some barriers to entry. Nevermann, past president of the national association, says the organization is trying to develop certification standards, complete with a test.
“The problem is, our membership is so varied,” he says. Many specialize. Nevermann, for instance, mainly moves people.
Recognition has also come slowly. Nevermann says he still hasn’t been able to persuade GTE to accept advertising under the “organizers” heading in its yellow pages.
To hear the organizers tell it, their jobs involve not just psychology, but psychotherapy. And like psychotherapists, they have to know where to draw the line. Nevermann, for instance, says he doesn’t make decisions for clients; otherwise they can become too dependent.
Motivating clients is always a problem. In some of her seminars, Gambrell suggests setting a timer for five or 10 minutes and straightening out as much as possible before the bell, after which you’re entitled to sit and watch the ballgame, have a cup of coffee or whatever.
The organizers are, of course, well-organized. Most are nattily turned out, even if many do have the air of third-grade teachers.
And they make sure their materials are well-groomed too. Edie Levenson, for instance, an organizer who says she likes to work for lawyers because they’re accustomed to hourly billing, has found that the printed material she produces has to look slick as well as be well-organized.
Using little notebooks that look like Filofaxes, these organizers take copious notes. There’s a lot to write down. Layer, for example, reports on an upcoming teleconference for those whose clients are among “the chronically disorganized.”
Such clients are frustrating, Layer says, but she looks on the bright side: “It’s repeat business.”
