You may be wondering what a Professional Organiser or a Decluttering Specialist can add that you wouldn’t be able to do on your own. To be honest, you wouldn’t be the first person to ask that question! At first sight, most people appear to have the abilities necessary to clear their space, shift items around, look at things and make decisions, etc., so why pay for someone to help you out? Isn’t this an unnecessary expense when you could do it all yourself?

This appears to be common sense, but ask yourself if it actually holds true for you?

Despite efforts to eradicate differences between men and women when it comes to behaviour, social connections, education, upbringing… there are clear differences in all those and many other fields of interaction with others still. We may have made some progress on this particular road, but we are far from equal in oh so many respects.

What interests me mostly is not so much the social differences as such, but the way they affect how men and women deal with their environment, the choices they make when it comes to accumulating things and dealing with their possessions.

Many of us have been brought up to rely on our own good judgement and make sure to be self-sufficient, relying on family for help if needed, but better not make use of that too much. This seems to me to be a very pressure-ridden approach, especially since the way families work today is very different from only 50 years ago.

More and more people live alone, in relatively small homes, and their families further away than just the next larger town. This puts us into ever more of a difficult spot: we rely on friends rather than family members to a much larger degree than used to be the case for our own parents. Worse even: many – especially the older generation – may not have friends in a position to provide assistance when needed, and they have to fall back on social services or the kindness of neighbours and total strangers.

I have written and spoken in videos a lot about what I call the “outsider’s view”, the notion that we get used to the way things are and stop seeing any other way of doing thing, or arranging things in your home. This also includes our ability to overlook when things start to slide and stuff starts accumulating in the dark corners or on top of your furniture outright.

It requires an outsider to come in and point out what seems to go wrong, as well as the person(s) living in that home to trust and accept that advice if change is to be happening anytime soon.

While quarantine is gradually taken down to a lower level, it seems that my business has changed a little throughout the last couple of months: a lot of it has been taken online and virtual organising has become more of a thing for me than ever before.

YES: I have done virtual assistance before the lockdown. In truth I have never really advertised it as a standalone thing, but rather as a follow-up at the end of a live session with clients to keep tabs on their progress. These days, however, the virtual side has become as relevant to me as the live assistance in my clients’ homes.

The following content obviously contains generalisations that are solely based on my own impressions while working with clients. Furthermore, most of my clients belong to the older age bracket and have lived in households with traditional male/female task separations.

In any couple, there is usually one partner who keeps the communications with outsiders open, while the other surfs the waves that come their way to some degree. In my experiences with clients, there often is a huge gender difference when it comes to keeping up with social contacts outside the relationship or family, and in heterosexual couples this role most often falls to the woman, rather than the man.

There is a lot that can be said about minimalism and the Tiny House movement, of course, and in general I’m very much on board with what both of those movements bring to the table. Minimalism is impressive in its stance to minimise the number of items in one’s household, and a tiny house has a lot of advantages over a regular flat or house.

Of course, they also have their drawbacks. Minimalism can easily come across as to the outsiders as having crossed a line and leaving behind comfort and variation and living in a tiny house can feel claustrophobic to those who aspire to live in wide and open spaces. I would assume that there are minimalists out there who would not want to live in a tiny house, as well as tiny house dwellers who are far from organised and minimalist.

We live in times where being active all the time is equalled to being successful. While this is not necessarily the truth, most of us will have bought into this idea to some degree. Let’s be clear about this: I’m not saying this is completely wrong. It can have a disastrous effect on your mental health, though.

Since we have at least half adopted that line of thought, it is increasingly difficult to do something that cannot be vaguely qualified as ‘productive’. The trouble is that quality time to yourself is only beneficial to yourself and while it is useful to you it never registers as ‘productive’ to others. And that leads to two effects: others will see you doing nothing of consequence and you’ll feel bad for being unproductive. Let’s tackle those:

As mentioned in the previous post, there are some clear differences between decluttering men and women, as far as I have picked up on them. One of those is related to our ability to collect things and how we accumulate items that fall into the broad category of ‘a collection’.

Keep in mind that a collection does not have to consist of physical items, but could be anything you can think of. Even if you believe that you are not a collector, on some level you’ll find an area in your life, in your home, in your free time, where you do actually collect things.

Decluttering as an industry is often portrayed as something that mostly women are involved in. It is most certainly true that the majority of professionals in the industry appear to be women. When it comes to clients, that image is a little more varied, and in my personal experience, I had my fair share of male clients. However, that is not necessarily what I hear from my colleagues…

This made me think that the perception in this matter may be a little biased and I started considering what the main differences could be.