Your house is a mess. Full of so much stuff that you can’t find anything you need when you need it.
You need help organizing things and turning your home into a place where you can do your work neatly and live your life with joy, especially now since so many of us are working from home.
That’s where Karen Simon, Shinobu Kuroyanagi and Paige Altonn can help. They are local members of the National Association of Productivity and Organization, which offers courses in organizing and operates as a registry for people who are trained in the art of bringing “order and efficiency to people’s lives.” These organizers have developed reliable techniques and principles for organizing one’s home or office.
Simon is a co-founder of Island Organizers, a consulting firm that advises businesses and individuals on organizing their offices, whether at home or in a separate building, as well as tips on technology tools. With her business partner, the late Donna McMillan, she co-wrote a book, “Solving the Organizing Puzzle,” which offers practical fundamentals on organizing, based on their own experiences. The book is mostly focused on business, but there’s plenty in it that applies to home organizing as well. It was released during the pandemic, but Simon is planning to have public promotions soon.
Simon said people often confuse what being organized really is.
“People have this misconception that being organized only means decluttering and having stuff look nice,” she said. “But it’s not just about having things in their places, it’s about how you operate in the rest of your life. Are you on time? Do you plan? Do you look ahead for what’s going to happen tomorrow? There’s so many things you need to plan for.”
The book is based on four concepts, the most basic being the idea of seeing a space — it can be a physical space like a kitchen or bedroom, a space on your computer, or even a period of time — as “Million Dollar Real Estate.”
“Precious space is worth millions,” Simon said, and so it should be organized according to whatever activity takes place there. “If this is where you read, then you need to have a space there for your bookshelves, and a place to sit comfortably.”
The second concept, which is applied to a million-dollar real estate, is that “Clutter confuses. Uniformity creates calm.” Simon said a disorganized bookcase, where some books are on their sides while others are standing up, can be distracting, whereas one where books of similar sizes are lined up edge to edge “creates a calming effect, because it’s not all busy and different colors.” With the mind calm, the activity at hand should be easier, she said.
A third principle is the idea that “Everything Deserves a Home.” Part of that concept is the importance of having a “dumping zone” near the entry of a home, Simon said, a place to unload items from your day at work, as well as things like groceries that you might have picked up on the way home. The problem, she said, is that the items often stay there because you haven’t decided where they should really go. According to Simon, “Making Decisions” is principle No. 4, the most difficult concept of all because it can be so personal.
“People put things in those spaces where they do not belong, and that is how stuff gets classified as ‘clutter,’” she said.
IN RECENT YEARS, Marie Kondo of Japan has emerged as an international celebrity through her concept of “finding joy” in your belongings — and discarding those items where you can’t. Japanese native Shinobu Kuroyanagi uses similar concepts to help Japanese speakers in Hawaii organize their households.
She took a few courses in organizing when her husband relocated here for work 11 years ago, and she had to pack up her two children and move here on her own. Her husband, who worked with the JTB travel agency, passed away in 2017, “but because my house was very organized, that helped me move on to the next stage (in life),” she said. She now owns a massage salon, Aloha Hands, in Waikiki in addition to helping people organize their households.
During the pandemic, she ran several organizing “boot camps” on Zoom. The monthlong course focused on the kitchen — Kuroyanagi used her own kitchen to explain her principles and ideas. People often wind up with multiples of the same item in their kitchen — pancake mix, for example — because they don’t know where to put them, she said. “If you know where to put it, where to find it, those things never happen,” she said.
(To date, all of Kuroyanagi’s sessions have been in Japanese but since her teenage daughter is bilingual, she is thinking of offering the sessions in English too.)
Beyond the kitchen, people often accumulate things like gifts that they are unwilling to let go of, but Kuroyanagi explained that it’s the thought behind the gift that’s really important, not the gift itself. “If you like it, keep it, but if you don’t like, don’t keep it,” she said.
In Hawaii, it is especially important to stay organized because households tend to be crowded and small, and people often have to work several jobs, she said. “There are three keys,” she said. “Get organized so you can make more time; stay organized so that you can keep more money; stay organized so that you don’t get stressed.”
She compares a home to a cellphone charger. “Our house is our charger,” she said. “We need to get it clean. We have to respect that we need it to be clean, so that we can get all of its energy into ourselves.”
PAIGE ALTONN said she’s always had a knack for organizing — “I’ve always been an ‘A’-type personality — super-organized, multitasker kind of person,” she said. “I just like things to be neat and tidy and be in the right place.”
One of her main principles for organizing is: “How are you going to use that item, how does it work with your life?” In her own kitchen, for instance, she has certain coffee cups that she uses twice a week that she keeps on top of her microwave. Other cups, used only for guests, are tucked away in a cabinet.
But where her expertise really comes in handy is in running garage sales that help people turn clutter into profit. She visits garage sales herself frequently, and she knows what items are in demand and at what price. (Her tip for people looking to downsize now: “Furniture is hot right now, because shipping from the mainland is so slow.”)
“I like knowing that people will give me money for stuff that I don’t want, don’t like and don’t use,” she said.
“I help people look at their belongings in a different way,” she said. “It’s like having a wedding dress and being married for 50 years. If you don’t have a daughter and you don’t have a granddaughter and you don’t have somebody who’s going to wear that dress, why do you still have it? I get the sentimentality of it, but for someone who wants to travel or downsize, it’s time to donate it. Donating is a really good thing, because somebody else can use it.”
Altonn said the pandemic actually gave people the chance to tidy up. “There was a lot of purging,” she said with a laugh. “A lot of people who had the time went through closets and went through drawers, and they really did some downsizing and consolidating of their belongings.”
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HELPING HANDS
>> Karen Simon can be reached through Islandorganizers.com. Her book “Solving the Organizing Puzzle” also can be ordered through the site.
>> Shinobu Kuroyanagi can be reached at shinobu.kuroyanagi@gmail.com.
>> Paige Altonn can be reach at IslandStyleOrg@gmail.com.
