When swapping out winter clothing for lighter spring/summer attire, it’s a great opportunity to perform a closet audit. Take a look at which items were never or rarely worn versus your go-to items and determine what you want to hold onto for future use versus what you can give away. Consider which items you love, which you kinda-sorta like, and which ones make you cringe, and sort accordingly.

Have you ever embarked on an organizing project, but midway through the project you lost steam, your momentum vanished and your excitement disappeared, so the project was never completed?

I’ve been taking an online class from Janet Luhrs, a simple living advocate who I’ve followed for the past 20+ years and the author of The Simple Living Guide. The class is full of great information about leading a more simple and fulfilling life.

When addressing clutter, whether it’s paper clutter or stuff clutter, Luhrs uses the following terminology to help one determine whether or not to keep an item:

Does the item energize you, are you neutral with regard to it, or does it make you feel drained?

We're two months into 2017. How are your goals (or resolutions) holding up? Are you still on track?

Last year, my life began to feel more and more unbalanced, so I decided to make this year my year of balance. Each day, I make a conscious effort to ensure I'm filling up my tank with equal parts of physical activity or movement, spiritual wellness or meditation, healthy foods, gratitude, relationship-strengthening, and business-building. By doing this, I'm showing up as a stronger, better, more present organizer for my clients as well as a stronger, better, more present partner for my spouse. (Not to mention a kinder, gentler person to myself and everyone I encounter.)

Last month I was called for jury duty, which meant I was stuck in a gigantic room with 500 other Fulton County residents. What an opportunity for people-watching!

Soon after arriving, I noticed a woman near me digging through her purse. Minutes passed and she was still digging. I could tell she was starting to panic.

Many people store photographs in plastic bags, shoe boxes, envelopes from the photo developing company, and in those old albums with sticky plastic pages. I was no exception, until two years ago when I chose to remove all of my photos from the various photo albums I had acquired throughout the years and transfer them into…

As 2016 comes to a close, I’m humbled to report that my business will be three years old in January. Three years! For the past three years, I’ve been given the opportunity, time and time again, to help change people’s lives and their relationships with their stuff. I’m incredibly passionate about helping people to ditch the stuff that’s not serving them and creating a retreat they will love to come home to.

Have you made your holiday list yet? Have you started shopping for your loved ones? Americans are expected to spend more than $630 billion on holiday shopping this season. Before you buy, consider the impact each potential gift will have on your loved ones.

Since I live in a small space, I need to be incredibly intentional with the items that are kept, especially when it comes to holiday decor. The rule in my house is simple: I only have decorations for Christmas (no other holidays) and, aside from a small, three-foot artificial pre-lit tree, all of the decorations must fit into one large plastic storage bin. That's it.

I recently started working with a client who’s lived in her current house for 30 years and is considering downsizing in the next year or two. For the most part, she’s been really decisive about what she wants to keep and what she wants to donate. However, occasionally she’ll say to me, “A friend gave this to me, but I never really liked it. Do you think it’s okay if I donate this?”

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays! It's a chance to spend time with loved ones without the pressure of finding the "perfect gift" and, more importantly, a time to reflect on the things one is grateful for.

I’ve been helping a busy professional gain control of the stuff in her 3 bedroom/2 bathroom home because she was completely overwhelmed as to where to begin. By the time she contacted me, she’d tried and failed numerous times to get her home organized.

Pregnant with twins, my clients needed to figure out how to reconfigure their 1,400-square-foot bungalow to accommodate their growing family. A planned renovation was on the horizon, but it wouldn’t be happening for another year or so, so in the meantime, they needed to work with what they had, which meant adding a nursery to their guest bedroom/office space.

After repeated attempts to gain control of her home office, a client contacted me for help. She told me she didn’t know how to deal with her paperwork, and she was constantly searching for lost important documents in the dozens of piles strewn about her office. My client wasn’t interested in scanning the paper she had, she just wanted to get her paperwork to a manageable state.

Downsizing has become more and more popular as empty-nesters decide to ditch the suburbs to move closer to the city after their children have moved away. Oftentimes, empty-nesters also give up square footage when they move from a home in the suburbs to a condo or townhouse, which means they’re forced to evaluate their stuff to figure out what will fit in their new space versus what they can let go of.

Future projections indicate that consumers in the U.S. will spend $9.4 billion dollars on home organization products in 2017. As a professional organizer, I’m completely on board with the notion of containing the items in one’s home in order to be able to find the things you need when you need them. However, when clients contact me for help with organizing, oftentimes they’ve purchased a number of organizing products, but their homes are still disorganized. When I work with clients, I often “shop” their house to find underutilized containers and baskets we can use when organizing their space.

One of my favorite parts of being a professional organizer is brainstorming with my clients to come up with innovative ways to create order, redevelop an organizing system, or discover a different way of using an item. Instead of running out to the store to buy a new product, which can get costly very quickly, I think about ways to repurpose a piece of furniture or how to use a container in a creative way.

When a client contacts me for help with an organizing project, they’ve often tried many times to get organized and haven’t been successful. By the time I speak with them, they’re frustrated, overwhelmed, and feel hopeless that they’ll ever get organized.

Bathroom storage can perplex the best of organizers. Personal care products take up space! I'm lucky because my bathroom includes a vanity with three drawers and under-cabinet storage.

This past weekend, I embarked on a project of epic proportions: I started to organize my digital photos. And it is truly epic. You see, I’ve got about 13,000 digital photos to purge, sort, and organize. Eeeeek!!! For years I'd been procrastinating, and I finally got to the point where I'd had enough of the procrastination. I just needed to get started.