Clutter Free: Quick and Easy Steps to Simplifying Your Space – Kathi Lipp

Kathi Lipp, author of Clutter Free: Quick and Easy Steps to Simplifying Your Space and several other organizing books, has amazing instincts about the emotional issues surrounding people’s efforts to get organized. She is extremely sympathetic, and her Christian viewpoint might be particularly comforting and empowering to women of faith. And she’s just plain sensible: her ideas are easy to understand, and gentle to try to implement. But she isn’t, to the best of my knowledge, a Professional Organizer, and so she doesn’t go far enough in her counsel. Ms. Lipp’s ideas aren’t easily adapted to “unemotional” issues: what if ADD is a root cause of someone’s disorganization, or being a highly visual thinker, or illness, divorce, multiple moves? Each of these “actions” has emotional impact, but different solutions. And I wish she’d go farther in other aspects of her work as well: for example, I wish she’d given her audience the list of the organizing books she may have studied, so they could explore other approaches and techniques. Gail Blanke wrote “Throw Out Fifty Things,” which may have inspired one of Ms. Lipp’s chapters. Cindy Glovinsky wrote “Making Peace with the Things in Your Life,” a wonderful complement to Ms. Lipp”s work. I intend to get Ms. Lipp”s “The Get Yourself Organized Project.” I think I’m going to enjoy it as much as I enjoyed “Clutter Free.: But I hope her readers will seek out multiple perspectives.