My favorite organizing book

I was traveling on business this week, and during a presentation to real clients mentioned that organizing is a hobby/passion of mine. After listening to me talk for 3 hours about work stuff two women stopped me to ask one question - how do we get organized!?!

I pointed them to my favorite organizing book as a great starting point - Julie Morganstern's "Organzing From The Inside Out".

My favorite things about this book are:

1) The analysis at the front breaking down reasons for disorganization. They range from the uber-practical (nothing's put away because it doesn't have a home) to the very deep (people use clutter as a way to avoid emotional intimacy). Reading that section alone was a huge help for me to identify what solution is right in a given situation based on the root cause of the issue.

2) The emphasis on working with your natural tendencies. Many disorganized people think somehow they're bad people for being disorganized. But the truth is we all have systems we use to keep track of things and some natural tendencies for keeping things in order. The idea that it's not the person whose broken, just the system, is refreshing for people I work with. It's also easier to study the systems that do work for people and make minor adjustments to those than to make them try to relearn a totally new routine for things they do almost on autopilot, like put down the mail after a long day of work.

There are a myriad of other things I love about this book, but those were two of my biggest ah-ha moments. If you buy only one organizing book ever, I recommend it be this one. Thanks, Julie!