The five-hour makeover; hiring an organizer can help you tackle office clutter and streamline business - Office Design

Home Office Computing, Oct, 1993 by Bob Duke

At age 44, Leslie Nicolaides finally admitted to herself that she was disorganized. As a home-based sales director for a cosmetics firm, her work habits had slowly eroded and were now affecting her bottom line: Bills were past due, receivables were late, and hot leads were turning cold. Even worse, Nicolaides was avoiding her office.

"It was a long time building, but I just got so disgusted," she recalls. "I didn't like the person I'd become, and I wanted to change."

This was serious, something no self-help book could fix. Nicolaides needed professional help--fast. Through her contacts, she was referred to McMillan & Co., a professional organizing company, in West Los Angeles. The cost to have someone come in and completely reorganize her office was $40 an hour, for a minimum of five hours.

Two weeks after Nicolaides made that desperate call for help, Donna McMillan, the company president, arrived promptly at 11:45 a.m. on Nicolaides's doorstep. The two women were to embark on a five-hour organizing frenzy. Nicolaides appeared anxious, beaming with pride that she'd found the courage to act; McMillan stood speechless in the office doorway, surveying the mess.

"How bad is it?" Nicolaides asked.

"Ah, about normal," McMillan replied, as she stripped off her jacket.

Stretched before her lay a 10-by-l2foot room. The trestle desk, buried beneath mounds of files, was recognizable only by the telephone, answering machine, and calculator perched on top. Across the room and several feet from the desk stood two filing cabinets, also littered with papers. A dusty copy machine sat at the back of the office. The closet door, no longer able to resist the pressure of overflowing boxes, swung ajar. And newspaper clippings, Post-it notes, fliers, receipts, bills, cartoons, and subscription forms--many yellow with age--peppered the walls and furniture.

"First," ordered McMillan, "the floors." The two women fell to their knees and set to work. Eliminating the stacks, they were soon able to force the closet door shut. As they gathered up items, McMillan explained how she was about to proceed: After the floor was completely cleared, they'd rearrange the office furniture, clean off the desktop, create a filing system, and end the five-hour session by sorting through a wire rack of overflowing files that completely dominated one end of the desk.

McMillan dragged the desk across the room so that it butted the filing cabinets, creating an L-shaped cluster at the far end of the office, out of earshot of the hallway. This new setup allows Nicolaides more privacy while on the phone with clients. The layout also puts her files within reach of the desk--so paperwork can be easily returned to its place. "Remember to clear the decks every day so you don't become overwhelmed by accumulation," McMillan instructed. In addition, this new design affords Nicolaides's work surface more natural light and ventilation from the window beside her.

The copier was moved near the door so her husband, who works in his home office down the hall, could use it without interrupting. The benefits were immediately obvious, the results stunning, and they had only been at it for 40 minutes. Little did Nicolaides know, that had been the easy part.

Next, the two women tackled the desktop with gusto. The goal was to separate items into two piles: One for filing and another for disposal. Items that didn't fit into either category were temporarily stored in an empty drawer for Nicolaides to sort through after the organizing session was completed.

But soon their moods began to change. Tensions rose. There were minor spats, and Nicolaides was showing signs of exasperation as McMillan pressed her for decisions. When the umpteenth trash bag was filled and the desk covered with six piles of paper, Nicolaides was ready to call it quits. An undaunted McMillan, however, began stripping papers and pictures off the walls and handing them to her for more decisions.

By 1:45 p.m., it was time to move to the next task: creating a filing system. To prepare for this project, McMillan had Nicolaides write a list of the main categories of her business activities. Then, as part of the clutter therapy, she made Nicolaides justify all the files to force her to think about how necessary they were to her business--in preparation for organizing the remainder of the paperwork. With Nicolaides seated behind her desk and file cabinets at her side, McMillan handed her items from the piles of paper. This is the difficult part of becoming organized, when the client must touch everything and deal with it immediately.

"People are so emotionally involved with everything in theft offices that when they try to organize, they get distracted from the project at hand. It's my job to keep them focused," McMillan says.

Finally came the wire rack of file folders that occupied the desk. These were supposed to be daily action files, but Nicolaides confessed she had not used them for some time. McMillan explained that action files should be recycled frequently and not used as storage. Within the next 60 minutes, those files were reduced from 20 to six.