Clutter: How to sort it out

When the kitchen bench is covered in piles of school notices and unopened letters, your dining table creaks under the weight of miscellaneous household junk, your bedroom carpet is hidden by a layer of discarded clothing and the children's toys trip you up in the hallway, there's clearly a serious clutter problem going on.

But never fear. Help is at hand in the form of professional organisers who will visit your home and guide you through the process of regaining order and freeing up your horizontal surfaces for their intended purposes. Often it's simply an absence of appropriate systems that lead to messy houses but in the US a body called Clutterers Anonymous operates a 12-step programme based on that of Alcoholics Anonymous to help those for whom the problem is more deep-rooted.

There are many benefits to de-cluttering a messy home or workspace. As well as making the area more attractive, it also makes it function more efficiently. It saves time as you won't be constantly looking through piles of items to find something. And without objects to trip over, the area will be safer as well. De-cluttering is not a stand-alone discipline; it's intrinsically interwoven with both the organisation of spaces and time management.

Auckland-based organiser Cara Gilkison says her fascination for the field was sparked when she read the book Cheaper by the Dozen, a memoir by an efficiency expert with 12 children. "It was about how he organised them and how they made the best use of time; they'd learn a language when they're in the bath and this sort of thing," she says. "I was kind of captivated by that."

Gilkison has assisted people who had so much clutter they'd have to stay up all night just to locate a passport or who had an old aeroplane wing inside their house. She's also occasionally encountered clients with unrealistic expectations.

"Sometimes people want you to come and wave a magic wand but there is no magic wand. You actually have to touch every single thing that's there and you actually have to make a decision about every single thing. Everything needs a home," she says.

"When you approach things with people it's really about what their needs are and what's holding them up. You have to identify what is causing the problem in the first place and if they've got a problem, what's stopping them fixing it."

Gilkison says that serious clutter problems are often the result of disorders such as autism, Asperger syndrome or obsessive compulsive disorder. "Those people are very, very difficult to help. But they don't usually ask for help because they don't actually want anyone to touch their stuff."

Emotional attachment may figure strongly in someone's reluctance to get rid of clutter. "It's about encouraging them to recognise that if you give away something that you don't particularly want or need, you're not giving away the love that came with the present in the first place," says Gilkison, who adds that people with certain personality types allow the clutter to build up because they actually enjoy subsequently making order out of chaos and "conquering a big mess".

Stacey Davidson, organisations solutions manager for stationery and desk accoutrement retailer kikki.K, understands the tendency of paperwork to accumulate around kitchen benches and home offices.

"Even if you're not working or running a business from home, no matter what you're doing, paperwork just keeps coming. You end up with piles of it. So why is that? It's because we don't have our paperwork moving through the stages and stations. The big tip we start with is that paperwork needs to flow," she says.

To help combat the problem, kikki.K runs workshops that focus on managing paperwork and has recently launched a personal organising service for one-on-one consultations in the home. "I love organising because of the by-product of it. For my clients it's really about the fact that when you're organised you free up lots of mental space and lots of time."

For people who've known financial hardship in the past, holding fast to familiar items may be an ingrained survival response. For other people possessions can be status symbols entangled with their sense of self.

"The whole professional organising industry on the surface level looks like it's about tidying up and getting rid of things but there's a lot of emotion linked up in why people hoard," says Davidson.

"A good organiser can work with someone on that level to help them emotionally let go."

Moments of personal crisis such as divorce or an illness in the household are known to trigger organisational issues and the need for a spot of de-cluttering.

"Everybody, in some area of their life or at some time in their life, has probably experienced that point of overwhelm, when the systems that you have to keep yourself sane and organised buckle. And it's usually when there's a big change in your life - like having a baby or taking on a new job."

De-cluttering specialist Angella Gilbert will work on entire houses or on single rooms. "People generally will have one or two shocking rooms in the house. The typical dumping rooms will be the spare room - which no longer becomes the spare room because no one can get into it and the second is the garage."

According to Gilbert, clutter problems are chiefly caused by people continually bringing new things into the house but failing to discard older possessions as they do so. In an ideal world people would remove one item every time they purchase something new but she acknowledges this is too rigid a discipline for many people.

Most of Gilbert's clients are multi-tasking women who care for children, run a household and are often in paid employment too. "When I first meet them I say: 'Look, I'm not judging you by any means because everybody lives busier and busier lives these days and it gets harder and harder to keep control of everything'.

"They don't have the time to sit down and think about systems and how to organise. I'm an expert and I do have the time to look around and see what solutions work best."

Christchurch-based Wendy Davie is a founding member of the Australasian Association of Professional Organisers, author of The Accidental Organiser and the only organiser in New Zealand to have been certified by the US-based Board of Certification for Professional Organizers.

Through her company Totally Organised, Davie has consultants in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch available for assignments that range from "four hours to de-clutter the guest room before the mother-in-law arrives to up to two weeks of clearing, sorting and organising deceased estates".

Davie believes her clients often find it reassuring that, despite her credentials, she's not a "naturally organised" person herself.

"Because I have to work at it I actually 'get it'. There's a bit of empathy there. I know what it can feel like to be overwhelmed," she says. "You get to the point where you can't see the woods for the trees and you think: 'I'm so over it. I don't know where to start'. It becomes insurmountable. I'm not scared to admit that I actually hired one of my own organisers once."

"Things that create stress when you look at them are the things you shouldn't have in your life," says Davie, who suggests using a kitchen timer in the battle against clutter.

"Set it for 15 or 30 minutes, whatever you can stand, and just get stuck into that space. You'll discover that you get a lot more done than you anticipated." And one final trade secret? "Play music when you're de-cluttering. Anything by AC/DC's good - and Queen. It's got to be upbeat and motivating."

Helpful hints

* When de-cluttering you need to make a separate decision about each object. Have you used it in the past six months? Do you love it? Can it be recycled, donated or given away? If you end up keeping it, you must allocate a home for it.

* If you're holding on to an unwanted object simply because it was a gift from a loved one or it has some other sentimental meaning, try taking a photograph it. Many people find this enables them to preserve the memory and a sense of the intrinsic symbolism while allowing them to dispense with the object itself.

* To help stay orderly, apply the 30-second rule. If it takes less than 30 seconds to put away something you've used, do it immediately rather than let clutter build up.

* For serenity in the home office, apply kikki.K's six station paper-flow solution which focuses on moving paperwork through logically. The six steps are entry point, current action station, access files, reference files, archives and exit point.

* If you're inclined to discard clothes on the bedroom floor or on a chair, save both untidiness and double handling by moving closer to the wardrobe or laundry basket when undressing.

* Staying free of clutter is an ongoing project. Wardrobes and cupboards should be de-cluttered every two or three months as part of a regular maintenance programme.