Getting organised, or embracing clutter?

Storage boxes and shelves become hot commodities as people prove unwilling to part with 'stuff'

While walking through Times Square recently, organising guru Cynthia Townley Ewer looked up and saw something that surprised her. Mixed in with the advertisements for electronics and entertainment was a billboard for the Container Store.

"It just seemed so out of place," she says of the ad featuring brightly coloured plastic organisers. "But then I realised, No, this really is a symbol of what's going on right now with the marketing of these so-called solutions to our clutter problem."

Ewer, who runs OrganizedHome.com, isn't completely opposed to the use of products for storing things. But she argues they shouldn't come first. "Getting organised does not involve buying things," she says. "It involves making decisions and changing behaviour."

Choice of options

But changing behaviour can be hard, and people need help to help corral all the "stuff" - mail, remote controls, T-shirts and ballcaps - that fills their homes.

In the mid-20th century people had to make do with cutout cereal boxes to store their magazines, but today, thanks to manufacturers offering a wide choice of options, people have numerous stylish ways to house everything from DVDs and CDs to photographs and kitchen tools.

"There is just a huge need out there for people who want to get organised," says Donna Smallin, author of The One-Minute Organizer Plain & Simple. "I think that we all are dealing with a lot more stuff than we need to have."

The number of organising products has grown in the past two to three years, says Ewer, catching up with recent societal changes.

Homes are bigger, for example, offering people plenty of places to stash things. And advances in entertainment technology ensure that where once a family maybe had one remote control, now at least three or four are on the coffee table.

People are frequently tied to their possessions emotionally - keeping them for sentimental reasons - or they get hung up on the question, "What if I need this some day?"

"The reality is that a lot of people are having a tremendous amount of trouble throwing (things) away," says Stephanie Winston, a long-time organiser whose latest book is Organized for Success.

Even though people have been told for years about the need to streamline and organise their lives, "these products would not be popular the way they are if people were in fact following the advice to throw away", she says.

As unlikely as it sounds, watching TV may be helping fuel the public's desire. Multiple shows now take on people's clutter, including Clean Sweep on the Learning Channel, Mission: Organization on Home & Garden Television, and Clean House on the Style Network.

Ewer notes that people aren't in and out of one another's homes in the same casual way as they once were.

"You come at an invitation," she says, "and your hostess has shoved the dirty clothes into the oven, and she's pushed the dishes under the sink. And you go into her home and you say, 'Gosh, nobody lives like I do' ".

Universal problem

These popular TV programmes help break down that notion, she explains. "People say, 'Look, I think that's even worse than my house'. And it's not so much that they're gloating, it's that they're saying, 'Wow, other people have this problem'."

Some consumers contend that today's plastic gadgets and furniture with storage help to tackle their clutter.

Not everyone is as confident about where to begin. A typical problem, say experts, is that people are overly ambitious about what they want to do, aiming to tackle an entire project at once, rather than trying to chip away slowly at the messy tables and closets that confront them.

Those who are truly perplexed often seek professional help, as Vincent Miles Taylor did. Taylor was one of the makeovers on the first season of the TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

Another recent customer at the Container Store in Manhattan, he attributes his motivation for building wall units and buying colourful storage bins to what he learned from the "fab five" cast members on the show.

"They inspired me," he says, his shopping cart piled high with shoebox-size red, blue, and yellow plastic stowaway boxes for his kids' socks and innerwear.

"A point that stayed with him about containers: They're meant to be useful, not for hiding unsorted stuff.

Retailers say the idea of using products to get organised isn't really new. "We don't really think of storage and organisation as a trend," says Melissa Reiff, an executive at the Container Store, which opened in 1978. "It has been strong for us from the very, very beginning."

She argues that one of the reasons the topic is getting more attention recently is that people's lives are more chaotic. "People have to be reasonably organised to be able to accomplish what they want to."

They're more likely to be successful, she adds, if they have taken stock before they come into the store.

Ewer and Winston also advise people to assess what they need before they buy any items to help them organise.

"A specialty organising product is just a tool," says Ewer, "and if you use it the way it's intended to be used... at the end of the process of going through your stuff and setting some limits, it's a wonderful thing. The real problem is marketing it as the process itself."

© The Christian Science Monitor