Clutter Busters : You Say Your Desk Looks Like a Toxic Waste Dump, and You Have a Suspicion It May Reflect More Deep-Seated Problems; Now You Can Hire a New Kind of Expert to Organize Your Space, and Your Life

The stacks of papers on your desk look like they were organized by Hurricane Hugo.

Manila folders--those that got labeled--fall into three categories: miscellaneous, to file, or later. And your file drawers appear to have been stocked with booty from a search ‘n’ destroy mission at the Rose Bowl Swap Meet.

Who you gonna call?

For a decade or so, professional clutter busters have been available for hands-on organizing. But now there’s an elite cadre in their ranks: super organizers who make as much as $250-an-hour to streamline physical spaces, and, they say, transform lives in the process. These leading-edge systematizers, of whom there are only a handful nationwide, claim there can be big rewards for getting organized--payoffs far beyond just being able to find things the same day you start looking for them.

Camille Fulmer, for instance, a Kirkland, Wash.-based management consultant who specializes in what she terms “spatial impeccability” and “organizing people for the jobs they want next,” has found that getting clients supremely organized can add velocity to their careeer progress.

“What we’ve found, organizationally, is that when you have a mess . . . everything in your physical environment, and how it’s organized and managed, holds you at the your current level of effectiveness. When you’re overwhelmed, you can’t see anything else. You can’t see new opportunities. It’s like, ‘Are you kidding? I’ve got too much to handle already,’ ” says Fulmer, who charges $1,000 a day for her services and works through The Axis Group near Seattle.

She adds that, by contrast, all-out organization imparts both a feeling of serenity and possibility--a subliminal message that anything can happen.

And often it does. Three months ago, for example, Marie Smart, was the credit claims supervisor for American Arts and Graphics in Everett, Wash., a firm that hired Fulmer’s services for several of its executives.

“I was a pretty organized person, but what Camille helped me to do was to be complete about my organization, to a very professional level,” Smart recalls. “I then had the energy to concentrate my efforts on developing a new position in the human resources department.”

Three weeks after being organized by Fulmer, Smart was offered the human resources job, a promotion she originally expected would take “months if not years” to earn.

Earlier this week, Smart received her second promotion in just over three months, becoming the personnel administrator in the human resources department. Jo Turner, the company’s vice president who was also organized by Fulmer, reports that getting key managers more organized has produced dramatic, trickle-down effects throughout the firm: “We’re seeing higher sales figures and more employee satisfaction.”

Some in the club of hot shot, high-priced organizers are also authors. Los Angeles’ Stephanie Culp (“How to Conquer Clutter”) and New York’s Ronni Eisenberg (“Organize Yourself!”), are organizational pioneers who take on private clients when not writing or speaking.

And a few super organizers have realized such a demand for their services that they’ve started to specialize. Beverly Hills-based Maxine Ordesky, for instance, only takes on storage-design assignments and is often hired to organize the wardrobes of Hollywood celebrities.

Still other top organizers work much like psychotherapists, encouraging customers to release or complete the unfinished, emotionally charged business that typically hides behind disorder. Indeed, a few of this new breed of neat freaks already are psychologists or counselors.

Helping people get their physical space organized is “very deep work,” maintains Susan Valaskovic, a Denver-based organization expert who holds a master’s degree in counseling. “When you go through your old stuff it triggers emotional memories . . . Before I leave a person’s home or business, I know them better than their mother does.”

Los Angeles-based marriage and family counselor Lila Gruzen, agrees. “The reason (many people cannot conquer clutter) is because it’s more than organizing,” says Gruzen, who teaches workshops on “Letting Go of Clutter” at the Learning Annex and plans to begin working as a professional organizer soon. “They’ve stuffed a lot of feelings way down deep inside, probably from childhood, that are not resolved. It’s those feelings that are cluttering them and cause a cluttered surrounding.”

Case in point: Gruzen observes that adult children of alcoholics who grew up in chaotic homes may not have drinking problems themselves. Instead they may unconsciously use clutter to re-create the level of chaos they were comfortable with as children.

Denver’s Valaskovic, who provides workshops to business firms at $1,000 a day and organizational services to individuals at $75 an hour, cautions that because of the deeply revealing nature of organizational work, people should only work with organizers they feel they can trust: “People have had a lot of trauma and the last thing they need is somebody coming into their house or office like a little Hitler and saying, ‘Get rid of that!’ ”

Instead, Valaskovic asks her customers to answer several questions when considering what to dump and what to retain, since clearing out unnecessary stuff is a critical step in streamlining. Some of those trash/treasure questions require considerable soul searching: “Who are you? Where are you going? What do you need to get there? Does this make you money? Save you money? Save you time? Or improve the quality of your life?”

“The whole trick is to figure out what the purpose of your life is. Then it’s hard to explain why you’re keeping things that don’t fit in with that,” explains Valaskovic, who likens buying and maintaining useless possessions to a turtle carting around a shell that’s five times too big. “It’s hard to navigate with a shell like that and be an effective turtle.”

Though some critics may suggest that shell-lightening services are superfluous, outlandishly priced and yet another example of the excellence-obsessed ‘80s run amok, many of those who pay for such organizational shrinking tell another story.

Says Lee Larsen, vice president and general manager of radio station KOA in Denver, who hired Valaskovic to organize him and five other other employees, “It was definitely worth it financially. And it continues to be worth it . . . You want that organized, tidy, in-control kind of feeling. We learned, in fact, that we are not the national archive. We used to think we were. We had to save everything just in case somebody in the world might need it. . . . I would pay Susan twice her normal fee if I could get my wife to agree to let her go through her closets with her, but so far I’ve been unsuccessful.”

Does anybody ever regret having worked with a professional organizer?

Jeffrey Mayer, Chicago’s “Mr. Neat” who charges $1,000 for two, two-hour desk organizing sessions, offers a money-back guarantee with the first two hours of his services. He acknowledges he’s returned fees a couple of times to clients who were dissatisfied.

Hundreds of others, however, have been thrilled with the order Mayer brings to their lives. Says William Springer, vice chairman of Chicago-based Ameritech, one of the regional “Baby Bells”: “It worked with me. I think it helped me to concentrate better . . . I feel I’m more in charge of my job. The job isn’t in charge of me.”

A former estate planner and insurance firm executive, Mayer has written a book on his techniques (“If You Haven’t Got Time to Do It Right, When Will You Find Time to Do It Over?”) which will be published in January by Simon & Schuster.

“Over the years I found that I was just real well organized,” Mayer says. “I was always getting things done quicker and faster and trying to improve the quality of what I did. Five years ago, I started a consulting practice to teach people to save time and make more money. Little by little, I found there was a huge interest in it.”

Mayer describes his specialty as “taking a desk that looks like a toxic waste dump and in two hours all the stuff is gone and we wind up with a desk that looks like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. All we’re left with is a telephone and a pad of paper and a very efficient work space.”

(Like many super organizers, Mayer believes it not only looks good but is most efficient to have only one piece of business on a desk at a time and everything else stored in files. Mayer also recommends that if people need things around to remind them of what they have to do they simply make a list.)

After an initial, two-hour flight-deck installation, Mayer returns a week later for another two-hour session to teach more organizational techniques and do fine-tuning if necessary. He considers his fee to be an important gauge of his clients’ willingness to change: “At $1,000, you’re serious. And the people who work with me hire me because they make more money with less effort. They get home an hour earlier. They have more time for themselves and their families. They get through projects that were long dormant.”

But not everyone is convinced that super organizers are always the super solution to super messes. Don Aslett, perhaps the best-known name in the organization field and an author whose eight books have sold more than a million copies combined, warns that “there’s a lot of self-assumed organization experts in this world, MBAs--More Bad Answer types.”

The author of “Clutter’s Last Stand” and “Is There Life After Housework?” cautions that hands-on assistance is largely unnecessary and may not be worth the fees, large or small. (While super organizers’ fees usually start at $75 an hour, services of other professional organizers are available at lower prices. According to Beverly Hills’ Ordesky, who is the national president of the 300-member National Assn. of Professional Organizers, many members’ fees are about $35 an hour.)

Aslett, who owns a large cleaning firm and does not do hands-on organizing, says he has been booked to present seminars with some of the country’s professional organizers and “they’re so unorganized it scares me.”

Aslett also claims the pros sometimes offer erroneous advice, such as blanket rules on getting rid of anything that hasn’t been used for lengthy periods. “That is the falsest criteria!” he insists. “You don’t use a fire extinguisher for 50 years. You still need it. I don’t think you can make decisions on other people’s junk. A teddy bear with two ears missing is not junk if it enhances a kid’s life and a Mercedes could be junk if you haven’t paid for it.

‘Just Junk Bunkers’

“Many of these people are just coming up with creative ways to store your junk. Closet organizers are just junk bunkers. File cabinets are just a way to to store wasted paper vertically. You can make junk real neat and it’s still junk.”

Aslett says he firmly believes thorough de-junking is the answer to most people’s organizational problems and that “you have to do it yourself.”

As for organizational skills, he contends they’re usually learned as a matter of necessity: “I don’t think you learn good management in school. It comes from being forced in a situation. You can take a lady who was an airhead and she has twins, and then another set of twins and her husband gets elected mayor and her sister dies and leaves her three kids. Even though she hasn’t been to school, she’s probably a better organizer than anybody in town.”

But what about those who are not forced to de-junk, and can’t seem to do it on their own? Reluctantly, Aslett admits some people might benefit from the services of a professional organizer. “I don’t want to be judgmental, but I’d be really cautious,” he says. “I’d check references. Nothing could be finer than to have somebody organize your life, if they’re credible.”

L.A.’s Culp says that by the time most people call a super organizer such as herself, they have taken “quite a step. They’ve admitted they can’t control (their clutter), it’s out of hand. I appreciate what it takes for them to do that.”

‘Motivational Tool’

She also argues that substantial fees charged by organizers are “a major motivational tool--they represent a commitment (to change).” In fact, Culp, who charges $125 an hour, requires that clients pay a deposit when they book time with her because “changing your mind on a whim goes along with being disorganized.”

In her case, such requirements haven’t dampened her business, which she says has grown steadily since she began it eight years ago. Calls for her work and that of other organizers have increased so much lately that she expects it will be commonplace for people to hire professional organizational help in the ‘90s.

Already, though, some of those who’ve worked with the super organizers are putting the service into the necessity category.

Kyle Winn, co-founder of The Axis Group was so delighted after his associate, Fulmer, organized him that he encouraged many of the executives he counsels to hire her as well.

“She’s given me the room to create,” he enthuses, adding that in terms of bottom-line results, he’s moved from owning one consulting company to two and is currently negotiating to own a third.

“I think (super organization) is a luxury if all you want to do is survive,” Winn concludes. “If you want to do more than just survive, it moves from being a luxury to a necessity.”