Confessions of a Professional Organizer: The Books That Helped Me Organize My Life Around What Matters
I’ve been a professional home organizer for five years, and I’ve talked with a lot of people about organizing their homes. We talk about what is and is not working in a space, what they want their home to feel like, and what “organized” means to them. Then, together, we figure out how to get there.
We also spend a lot of time working side by side. Organizing can get personal quickly. You’re letting me into your home, we’re sorting through your belongings, and we’re often sharing stories and experiences along the way.
One of my own stories that comes up is how I became a professional organizer. I have a short answer: I’ve loved organizing since I was a child. I have a medium-length answer: In 2017, I realized I needed a professional change, and I spent the next few years figuring out that my perfect midlife-crisis career was professional organizing.
This is the long answer.
About a decade ago, I was stressed. I was good at my job in marketing, but I was giving it a lot of my life. I started seeing the physical signs that I was out of balance. I wasn’t sleeping consistently. I was getting migraines. I had an eye twitch. (An eye twitch!)
At the same time, difficult personal experiences made me think more critically about how I was spending my time and valuing my health. My mother-in-law had died a few years earlier at age 57, and my mom was living with a complicated medical condition that caused chronic pain. I realized I was not guaranteed a happy, healthy, or stress-free retirement. I was also in my 30s, and three more decades felt like too long to accept an eye twitch as a regular part of life.
So my husband and I began making changes. We found the financial independence and early retirement movement, adjusted our lifestyle, and began saving a lot more than we had been. We grocery-shopped differently. I started baking bread—before the COVID sourdough craze. I learned about travel hacking and looked for credit cards with rewards programs that could reduce the cost of vacations.
I also read a lot about how to build a different life. None of this gave me an immediate answer to the question of what came next, but I started exploring less traditional answers.
In 2021, I left my full-time job, earned my organizer certification, and launched Essential Organizing. Looking back, the change was not caused by one dramatic decision or realization. It came from reading, reflecting, making practical changes, and paying attention to what I wanted more of—and less of—in my daily life.
I also know that this transition was possible in part because of privileges I had, including my education, my husband’s job, and the ability to save money before making a change. Leaving a corporate career is not equally accessible to everyone, and I don’t want to present my path as a simple formula anyone can follow.
Over the last five years, these five books helped guide me as I organized my life around what mattered to me. They gave me language for ideas I was already beginning to notice: stress does not resolve on its own, less of one thing can create room for more of what matters, spending less can create flexibility rather than be restrictive, and a life can be designed in small, practical steps.
So this confession is a brief pause from our regularly scheduled pantry-playroom-closet organizing to talk about how I reorganized my life.
Table of Contents
How Designing Your Life Helped Me Treat Career Change as a Series of Experiments
Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans gave me a way to think about career change without expecting myself to identify one perfect answer immediately.
Burnett and Evans apply ideas from product design to the process of designing a life. You can explore possibilities, test assumptions, and learn from what happens. That was useful to me because I knew I wanted to live and work differently, but I did not yet know exactly what the next version of my life would look like.
By the end of the book, I had created three different five-year life plans. One of them included becoming a professional organizer. So I practiced what that would look like. I cold-called local organizers and asked about their daily lives. I asked friends if I could come over and organize their houses. I talked to people who knew me well about whether they could see me in this life and what I wasn’t considering. Ultimately, of the three options, I decided to become an organizer and have since expanded into interior decorating.
I still recommend this book to friends, family members, and clients. My brother is currently living one of his five-year life plans from when he read it. My husband read it and became a photo organizer. It’s practical and actionable, and if I were to pick only one book on this list to tell anyone to read, it’s this one.
What Burnout Taught Me About Stress and the Need to Finish the Stress Cycle
I knew I was stressed in my corporate job, but most people around me were stressed too. It didn’t feel unusual or special. But I had no idea what that stress was physically doing to me.
In Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski explain what stress does to your body, why it is important to understand, and what you can do to “complete the stress cycle.”
They explain that many modern stressors are different from the immediate physical dangers humans faced in the past. If you were being chased by a predator, you would know when the danger was over and could begin to relax. But modern stressors—such as navigating office politics, replying to never-ending emails or managing other people’s needs and emotions as women often do— continue without a clear ending. The book offers practical ways to complete the stress cycle. My favorites were physical movement (I take a lot of walks), breathing exercises, and laughter. I stopped assuming my stress would resolve on its own.
How Playing with FIRE Helped Us Create More Choice
Playing with FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early): How Far Would You Go for Financial Freedom? by Scott Rieckens was the first book I read about the financial independence and early retirement movement. I have read many, many personal finance books, but this one is memorable because of the author’s personal story. It follows Rieckens as he learns about the movement and considers what changes might make financial freedom possible for his family.
The book’s basic premise is straightforward: spend less, but do so intentionally; save more and invest more; and create more freedom for the future. But choosing to spend less can feel countercultural, especially when spending is often presented as the easiest way to solve a problem or reward yourself.
My husband and I saved about half of our incomes for four years before I started Essential Organizing. While I didn’t retire, saving gave us flexibility. It created the option to leave a corporate job and build a different kind of work without needing the new business to replace my previous salary. It continues to give us flexibility today, including allowing my husband to leave his career in tech and start the photo-organizing arm of this business.
Essentialism and the Practice of Choosing What Matters Most
The central idea I took from Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown is that no one can do everything. You choose what deserves your time, attention, money, and energy—and you should be ruthless with your choices. In fact, he offers a principle that I’ve used with clients who ask for support letting things go:
When you’re looking at something in your home (or in this case in your life), if it’s not a hell yes, it’s a hell no.
I had a very finite amount of free time (don’t we all!) when I was taking steps to transition out of my corporate job and build my business. If what I was asked to do/invited to attend/felt guilty about saying no to did not align with what I needed to focus on at the moment, I declined. It wasn’t easy. But I ruthlessly chose what matters most anyway.
Another practice from the book that supported this was writing an intent statement for a particular period of my life. In 2019, mine was: “Reclaim my time, reduce my stress, and build a more flexible life by January 2022.” It gave me a way to evaluate decisions about how to spend my time and energy—and what success would look like (no more eye twitch).
How Getting Things Done Gave Me a New System for the Day to Day
When I left my corporate job, I assumed I would have more free time. I did have more flexibility, but I also had a long list of things I wanted to add: learn Spanish, volunteer for an annual fundraiser, garden more, start a business, try new recipes, and so on.
For the first time, I had more than two categories during the day (work and home life) competing for my attention. Once I even managed to double-book myself. That had never happened. Also, how was I supposed to organize other people’s homes if I could not organize my own calendar?
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen helped me see that part of the problem was not the number of things I wanted to do. It was that I was looking at too many things at once: tasks I could do today, tasks for next month, tasks dependent on another decision, and tasks related to plans that did not exist yet. I reformatted my to-do list so it focused on what I could do now. That simple change reduced the mental clutter of seeing everything at the same time.
Allen also suggests that unfinished tasks in your physical space weigh on you: the handyman you haven’t called, the shoes you need to return, the school forms you need to fill out. This resonated with me and I hear this from clients all the time. Someone just told me yesterday that “clutter causes me anxiety,” which makes sense because clutter is really a task you haven’t completed or a decision you haven’t made (Keep or toss? Where does this go? How do I use it?). Clearing the physical clutter (or adding the task to your list) also reduces mental clutter.
My to-do list system has evolved over the years and some days it is more cluttered than others. But the basic principle remains useful: get everything out of my head and onto my list, decide what I need to do now versus later, and continue prioritizing in real time. (The task on my list while drafting this post was “finish draft of book blog post,” which I’ll delete later today and replace with “build blog post.”)
Organizing a Life Around What Matters Is Not a One-Time Thing
When I first started this endeavor to reorganize my life, I wasn’t sure what I was doing and didn’t tell everyone about it. In fact, I never told my mom, who died in 2019 before I settled on professional organizing as my next step. One of the things I wanted to do was spend more unhurried time with her in my new, more flexible life. I regret not getting that time together and sometimes feeling like I was squeezing in time with her versus enjoying it.
Remembering that missed opportunity with my mom reinforces why I need to continue to choose what really matters. I add, complete, and delete tasks from my to-do list each day and my husband and I regularly check in on our spending to confirm it’s still aligned with our values. My current intent statement is: “Live my new flexible life, valuing personal and professional time equally, with the intent to maximize the life experiences I want to have with the people I love.” I review it quarterly and make and adjust plans to support it. Some days my life still feels a little frantic and my to-do list is always too long. But even when my life feels messy, I know it’s organized around what matters to me.
Of course you do not need to quit your job, bake bread or become a professional organizer for these ideas to be useful. But if you have ever looked around at your home, your calendar, or your life and thought, “This is not working the way I want it to,” one of these books may give you a helpful place to start.
If elements of your home feel like they are getting in the way of your life, I would love to help. As a Seattle professional organizer and interior decorator, I work with clients to create practical systems around what matters to them and how they live now. You can schedule a free, no-obligation video call to talk about your project.
Books Mentioned
Burnett, Bill, and Dave Evans. Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life. Knopf, 2016.
Nagoski, Emily, and Amelia Nagoski. Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. Ballantine Books, 2019.
Rieckens, Scott. Playing with FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early): How Far Would You Go for Financial Freedom? New World Library, 2019.
McKeown, Greg. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. Crown Business, 2014.
Allen, David. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Viking Penguin, 2015.
