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Noah Woods
CLEANUP The author’s home office went from chaos to order after the intervention of Lisa Whited, an interior designer. Clutter reigns, and storage space is improperly used.
I found a few professional organizers on the Web and made some calls, without much success. One woman charged a minimum of $250 an hour (because, she said, “I can get it”); another suggested I consider going paperless, putting everything on the computer (not an option, in my mind).
Then one day Liz, the daughter of my longtime boyfriend, Lou Ureneck, came to visit us in our small two-bedroom apartment in Brookline, Mass. Liz, a struggling actress in New York who pays the rent with odd jobs — waitress, party caterer, freelance cupcake baker — hadn’t spent much time with us before, but I quickly noticed her extreme tidiness.
When she went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, she never left the box of tea bags out for more than a minute; the used tea bag would disappear instantly into the garbage. And then, since she was already in there, she’d just clean everything, washing the dishes Lou and I had left in the sink, unloading the dishwasher, scrubbing down the counters for good measure.
I tried to thank her, but she shrugged it off. It was the just way she was.
I was awed, I was grateful. Liz was the one.
“Liz,” I said, leading her into my office, which was also the guest room in which she was staying, “do you think you might be able to help me with this?”
Within two days, she had waded through everything, consulting with me over what to toss and what to file under which category. We came up with dozens — Education Story Ideas, Bills, Manny Ramírez, Poems I Love, Expense Receipts, Letters from Mom and Dad — and she created a place for each, writing the headings onto manila folders that she dropped into hanging files in the double-wide, teak-finish filing cabinet I had bought at Ikea five years earlier, but had never made much use of.
After Liz went back to New York, some friends came to dinner. I raved about her wizardry with the filing cabinet and bragged that she had brought me to a higher state of organization. I was thrilled with this fresh start, and wanted to share my excitement.
“I did that once,” said one of the men at the table, a computer consultant, with a skeptical tone in his voice. “I got everything put away. And I never opened the filing cabinet again.”
“That,” I said serenely, “won’t happen to me.”
A few months later, it had. The cabinet was again serving mainly as a place to put notebooks, scraps of paper and letters I was planning to file tomorrow. The clutter had not only returned but multiplied. I was back to where I’d started, or worse.
I wasn’t alone. In the last decade, as our personal and work lives have become more frenetic, books by organizing gurus like Julie Morgenstern, Peter Walsh and David Allen have packed the best-seller list, and magazines like O and Real Simple have spent tens of thousands of words on the subject. The professional organizing business has grown exponentially (as evidenced, for example, by a 400-percent increase in the membership of the National Association of Professional Organizers since 1999).
Now, as unemployment is on the rise and freelance work and part-time jobs are replacing many full-time ones, more of us are spending more time in home offices (or in the tiny nooks that often pass for them). We may be spending less on furnishing them, but the demand for ways to make these spaces make sense has probably never been higher.
“People are overwhelmed,” said Nancy Black, a professional organizer in Beverly, Mass., for 26 years. “They’re trying to work 24-7. All you can do is help them figure out how to make their environment work best for them.”
But as serial readers of books on this subject learn — and as I learned after Liz’s masterful filing job — organization is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Just as people’s differing appetites, metabolisms and capacities for exercise mean that a given diet will work well for some, not at all for others, differences in work styles can run deep, and often call for customized approaches to the home office. And yet, the experts say, few of us take (or even believe we have) the time to figure out how we really work, or what kind of system is likely to work for us.
Which is why Lisa Whited, an interior designer who specializes in adapting work spaces to the needs, habits and goals of their users, began our relationship — one that would end up changing my life — with an interview.
Erik Jacobs for The New York Times After hanging shelves, Ms. Whited starts sorting.
I’d found Ms. Whited through Lou’s brother, Paul Ureneck, who lives near her in Maine, about two months after the papers in my office started piling up again. Although she was based in Portland, more than 100 miles north of our apartment, she came highly recommended, agreed to do the whole project for a fee under $500 and was already making the commute down to the Boston area for another job. (I wasn’t organized enough to think of writing about the experience until later, of course.)
THE interview started on the phone before we met, and continued into her first visit. Was I right-handed or left-handed? Which side of the desk did I answer the phone on? How much office time did I spend on the computer? Did the printer work for me there, to the left of the computer where I had to reach for pages with my left hand?
What about all those reporter’s notebooks stacked up on the desk, or the files full of notes spread out across it? How did I use them: did I need them out and open while I was working?
And what about that filing cabinet against the wall — the one with the papers stacked on top of it? Was that working for me?
It was not, of course, and that was one of my biggest problems. I found it strangely challenging to open that drawer, and I kept wondering who’d invented those hanging file folders that spilled all my papers onto the floor when I pulled them out of the cabinet. On top of which, I had a strong resistance to putting anything back in the cabinet that I might need anytime soon.
Ms. Whited said I was the kind of person who needed to see things in front of me or else I forgot I had them. Apparently, I’m not alone.
“More and more people I see aren’t using their filing cabinets, except for archival material,” Ms. Whited said. “It works great for some people — they’re the clean desk people. They take just one thing out at a time. They can focus on one thing at a time. They can put it back in the filing cabinet and take out the next thing they need.”
What I needed, on the other hand, was a system that would allow me to see a lot of my papers and other materials at once, without the chaos of a paper-cluttered desk. To create this, Ms. Whited said, we’d have to make use of vertical space.
She suggested installing three long white Elfa shelves on the wall above my desk, to support the rectangular bins that she was proposing as my alternative to the filing cabinet. I had stumbled upon the bins myself, at the hardware store down the block, and was using the two I had bought to hold papers and reporter’s notebooks. That was crucial: They were big enough to hold both notebooks and papers — filed in manila folders, when I really wanted to be on top of things — but not so big that stuff was lost inside. They were working for me.
Ms. Whited took my ad hoc efforts to the next level. I bought lot of bins, more than two dozen, in attractive shades of dark green and dark orange (I would have stuck to one color, as Ms. Whited advised, but the hardware store kept running out), dedicating each to a different category. I was a little worried about their price — $17 each, though I later found them at an art supply store for $15 — but I found that I loved having them there. I loved looking at them, all lined up within reach. They were like a map to all the interesting stuff in my work and private life, and they even made the uninteresting stuff — Bills, Expense Receipts — seem somehow pleasant.
The secret to this system was labeling the bins with category names, and for that, Ms. Whited told me, I would need a device that just about everyone whose work involves organizing seems to worship, the label maker. This battery-powered appliance, and the neatly printed black-and-white strips it churns out, gives off a hard-to-pinpoint but powerful vibe of organization, its advocates say, that even the neatest handwritten labels can’t match. “The labeler is a surprisingly critical tool in our work,” writes David Allen, the productivity consultant and efficiency expert, in his magnum opus, “Getting Things Done.”
Mr. Allen elaborated in a telephone interview, describing the process and rewards of label making in a fittingly telegraphic style. “You make a folder, you open it, you see the label, it’s done, ‘I’m a winner,’ ” he said.
Ms. Whited came to the label maker a few years ago, when she had a major health scare, and one of her first worries was about her husband and three small children: “How is Pete going to know where everything is?”
Having worked with an organizer herself, she knew about label makers. She bought one, and began labeling the clear plastic bins she stored everything in. Children’s medicine. Adult medicine. Bread. Waffles (In a plastic bin in the freezer). Candy. Cat treats. All the stuff in the cellar: Caulking. Paint thinner. Linseed Oil.
The tests came back negative. She was going to live — but never again without a label maker.
If the label maker is the universal organizing tool, labels themselves are an entirely personal matter, Ms. Whited and other designers and organizers say.
“When someone says to me, ‘How should I label this,’ I say, ‘I can’t answer that for you,’ ” said Ms. Black, the organizer from Beverly. “‘Otherwise, when I leave, you’re not going to be able to find it.’ ” She does frown on one particular label, though: “Miscellaneous,” which she sees as a black hole of a category. “‘If you really want it, you can have it,’ ” she tells clients, ‘but don’t tell anyone I helped you with it.’ ”
Once I’d picked my category names, labeled the bins and arranged them on the shelves, the system immediately seemed to work: there were about 30 bins, enough to handle the full range of things I needed to stay on top of but few enough that I could scan all their labels closely in about a minute. And the bins were small enough that I didn’t need to be fussy about the organization within each one; I could stick forms, notes and other papers into them without worrying about their exact position and still feel confident that I’d be able to retrieve them quickly.
Systems often fail, Ms. Black said, because people trying to get organized put too much pressure on themselves to do it perfectly. And one thing that contributes to this problem, she believes, is the tendency of magazines to show “perfect people in their perfectly organized offices.”
“ ‘They cleaned it up for the photo shoot’ — I tell people that all the time,” she said. “There is no such thing as the perfect system. It’s a matter of what the person is comfortable with in trying to make it work.”
Ms. Black has a client who is a sales manager for a food company and spends much of his life on the road, visiting restaurants and taking orders. He has a fairly well-organized filing cabinet in his home office, but he also has a habit of writing down important information on little scraps of paper, and then, when he gets home, dumping the scraps into a mess of papers on his desk, which is in his dining room. Ms. Black did not try to push him to start using a notebook or some other neater system; she just encouraged him to start putting the little slips into variously marked “action” folders — “Hot Leads,” “Customer Group 1” — that he keeps in a single large file on his desktop.
As a designer, Ms. Whited can make larger-scale adaptations to her clients’ work styles, or at least try to. On a recent job at a law firm, she met a lawyer who covered his desk and floor with papers in the course of preparing a case. The firm had always furnished its offices with desks and credenzas, but Ms. Whited saw that these surfaces were not working for this lawyer, or others in the firm, and proposed replacing them with low shelves that would surround him as he worked, like a pilot in a cockpit, allowing him to reach whatever he needed. The senior partners wouldn’t give up the credenzas, although Ms. Whited made the case that her unorthodox approach would save the firm money by saving the lawyer’s time.
“It’s about using the space you have better, it’s not about making it bigger,” Ms. Whited said of both her proposal and her work generally.
In taking on my space, Ms. Whited took aesthetic considerations as seriously as organizational ones: We had already established that the look of the room mattered to me, and to my sense of well-being in working there, even if I couldn’t see all the problems she did. In cases like the floor lamp with no shade, just a naked bulb, she didn’t consult me. “That has to go,” she said, and she took it with her to the dump in Maine.
Artwork was a trickier issue. A large map of an Alaskan river hung over the futon, and though I had never liked it all that much, I knew it meant a lot to Lou, who has spent time there fishing and rafting with his son. I was reluctant even to think about moving it, but Ms. Whited persuaded me to talk to Lou about the possibility. He wasn’t overjoyed at first, but we found a prominent place for it in the entrance hall, and it was replaced in the office with photographs of Martha’s Vineyard, set off on another wall by some watercolors — a change that made the space feel more soothing.
Still, having a work space in a home requires compromise, especially when space is tight. Lou has an office at Boston University, where he teaches journalism, a 10-minute walk from our apartment. But he also writes books, and what writer wouldn’t like an office at home, or at least a desk, to use on weekends, or early mornings before work, or late at night?
AFTER four weeks of working with Ms. Whited, and $1,800 spent on designer’s fees, organizing materials and hardware and a new (used) Aeron chair, I felt so happy in my newly organized office that I wanted to share it with Lou. With everything put away, the space seemed vast. Why should I have all that space to myself? Come on in, Lou. He set up an old desk against the wall next to the futon sofa, diagonally from mine.
He did what regular people tend to do at their desks: Talked on the phone in a voice above a whisper. Tapped at his computer. Directed occasional comments to the other person in the room. I did my best not to snap. And then he did one semi-weird thing: Lou is a fly fisherman, and one night he came into the office and began attaching some sort of vise to the side of his desk. It made a really loud clanking noise. Oh, that, he said. It’s a fly-tying vise. So when he wanted a break from writing, he could sit there and tie flies.
Goodbye, Lou. He was understanding. Eventually, he started using the dining room table as an auxiliary desk, or sitting on the living room sofa with his laptop.
Often, however, the home office has to be shared. Nancy Black has a client, a woman who is the chief executive of a small company and works out of a small room in her house. Her husband is an economist with an outside office, but he also runs a photography business from a desk next to his wife’s. He is, Ms. Black said diplomatically, not as neat and organized as his wife.
“The challenge there was to help her organize her part of the room so that it works for her — and to accept the fact that he’s not going to put away things neatly,” Ms. Black said. “You pick your battles.”
Her solution: Use the open shelving in the room for large bins where the husband could throw his things. “All she sees are bins,” Ms. Black said. Ideally, she added, there would be enough space so the husband could have his desk in a separate room. But “a lot of people with home offices do not have an ideal world.”
Then again, exposure to the not-yet-organized may not be entirely bad for those of us who’ve crossed over. There is such a thing, after all, as too much organization.
Last Wednesday, Ms. Whited’s 11-year-old daughter, Claire, who is in fifth grade, started looking around for her science homework. She had worked on it for days, filling one side of a white sheet of paper with more than a dozen colored drawings of liquids, solids and gases. She was sure she had left it face down on the dining room table, where her younger brothers like to color.
“My heart sank when she said it was right there on the table,” Ms. Whited said.
Claire was close to tears. “I kept saying, ‘I am so sorry, I am just so sorry,’ ” Ms. Whited said. “ ‘What can I do?’ She said I could write a letter to her teacher.”
So Ms. Whited sat down and explained, in a handwritten note: No, the dog did not eat Claire’s homework. Her mother, on one of her regular sweeps through the dining room, had recycled it. Pickup was on Tuesday.
Ahh, Breathing Room
Tips from Lisa Whited, an interior designer who specializes in adapting work spaces to her clients’ particular needs and habits.
• The No. 1 rule is clear out the clutter. Get rid of broken things that you won’t ever get around to fixing. Karen Kingston’s book “Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui” is a helpful guide.
• Color can help make a small or confined space feel more livable, and paint is the cheapest way to get it. “I painted the walls of my home office — a five-by-seven-foot, windowless walk-in closet — yellow,” Ms. Whited said. “I like yellow, and we had leftover cans of Behr’s Cornmeal in the basement.”
• Lighting is important: beyond a room’s general illumination, which could be overhead lighting, you can use task lighting, to work at your desk, and accent lighting, like a hanging light, to create an inviting space.
• Choose containers that are an appropriate size to hold what you’re putting in them. They don’t need to be fancy, but if they are going to be visible, they should at least look similar, so the space looks more organized.
• Get the best chair you can afford. “It’s like your bed,” Ms. Whited said. “You spend a ton of time in it.”
• Always have extras of whatever you usually run out of on hand. “I have at least one extra printer cartridge,” she said, “two reams of paper, staples, tape, etc.”
• Don’t dismiss the importance of candles, flowers, a great piece of art — whatever inspires you. It all helps.
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