Is this the first question on your mind when you hear about professional organizers?  Hiring a professional organizer does not mean that you are necessarily totally lost about strategizing a clean-up project or de-cluttering job.  You might have the greatest organizational skills, but your major project might be easier to start, or more realistic to complete, if you have the help of an unbiased person who is not a relative or friend.

    First of all, asking a professional to help you with your project gives you the advantage of an objective perspective.  This person can ask you the right questions to lead you in your decisions about keeping things, donating items, or throwing out useless materials.

    Hiring a professional will also force you to move forward with your project.  It is often easy to get sidetracked with other activities, especially if you have internal barriers about attacking certain organizational disasters.  But, if you have someone coming on a schedule to help you, you force yourself into a commitment to the job.

    When economic times were great, many of us liked to use shopping as a pastime, hobby, or way to perk ourselves up.  This did not stop at window-shopping, but a lot of things were bought that were not really needed.  Although this was good for the merchants, so many people are looking at all of the things that they have accumulated with a different eye.  Now that there is less money to spend, not only are folks stopping the shopping sprees, but the trend is to rid ourselves of unnecessary things, clear out the space around us, and surround ourselves only with what is beautiful and essential.

    In trying to embrace this new philosophy, working with a professional organizer is helpful, because he or she generally has a collection of ideas for determining how to pare down, contacts for donating items, and resources for organizing tools.

    And, last but not least, a professional is non-judgmental and loves organizing.  The more chaotic something seems, the more fun a professional will see in the work.  This way, you can share the work without worrying what the other person thinks.