Get your house in shape! Applying just an ounce of the advice in this practical guide saves you enough time and money to pay for itself. You will learn:
The actual scientific law of nature that helps you get organized
The cure for procrastination
Ten types of High Calorie Clutter to avoid
Where to start and how to tackle your projects
How to successfully add new habits into your life
Praise for The Clutter Diet: 'As a successful organizing coach, I immediately related with Lorie's motivational concepts in The Clutter Diet. Applying these principles can change your life!' --Dorothy Breininger, President of Delphi Center for Organization, Dr. Phil Show expert and author of Chicken Soup for the Soul: Life Lessons for Organizing and Balancing Your World
'What an exciting book! Getting organized has never been so easy. Lorie provides great real-life tips and advice that anyone can implement. You'll walk away with everything you need to know to get and stay organized.' --Jim Deitzel, Rubbermaid, eMarketing Manager
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As a successful organizing coach, I immediately related with Lorie's motivational concepts in The Clutter Diet. Applying these principles can change your life! -- Dorothy Breininger "President of Delphi Center for Organization, Dr. Phil Show expert and author of Chicken Soup for the Soul: Life Lessons for Organizing and Balancing Your World"
About the Author
Certified Professional Organizer Lorie Marrero is the creator of ClutterDiet.com, an innovative program allowing anyone to get expert help at an affordable price. Her organizing products are sold online and in stores nationwide. Lorie has been a spokesperson for Brother label makers and FedEx Office, and she is a sought-after expert for national media such as CNBC, Family Circle, WGN News and Woman's Day.
Product Details
Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Reason Press; First Edition edition (February 1, 2009)
Certified Professional Organizer® Lorie Marrero is the bestselling author of The Clutter Diet: The Skinny on Organizing Your Home and Taking Control of Your Life. She is also the creator of ClutterDiet.com, an innovative program allowing anyone to get expert help at an affordable price. Her organizing books and products are sold online and in stores nationwide. Lorie is the spokesperson for Goodwill Industries International, and she is a sought-after expert for national media such as CNBC, Family Circle, WGN News and Woman's Day. She has also served as a spokesperson for many other companies, including Staples, Brother, and Microsoft, and she writes regularly as an organizing expert for Good Housekeeping. She lives in Austin TX with her husband, two human sons, and 30,000 bee daughters in her backyard beehives.
Lorie Marrero is no stranger to clutter. I know this because her blogs and website have helped me sort through four storage units (saving me hundreds of dollars each month!) and most of my condo. Comparing the clutter of our lives with diet makes a lot of sense. Diet...we don't gain weight overnight and we can't lose it overnight. Same goes for clutter. All we need is a plan. Lorie provides us a plan to release this clutter.
There are many excellent books on Clutter and organization. This is one of them. Lorie helps you understand how the clutter is aquired and how to get it out of your life forever. It's not an easy task but this book helps you each step of the way.
The book is broken down in to four main sections, Getting Motivated, Clutter Prevention, Clutter Reduction, and Maintenance. Prevention helped me as much as the actual decluttering sessions. I learned to see "what enough looks like" - sounds simple but I did not know. So my "homes" for my items were overflowing. I am now learning what enough looks like.
The final section in the book breaks it down to suggestions on a room by room basis. She suggest products to help you along the way but you don't need to buy anything (other than the book) to implement Lorie's system.
This book is very easy to read and well organized.
Lorie Marrero makes the cogent point that a cluttered life is a reflection of a cluttered mind. Using the metaphor of a food diet for the process she recommends to organize your life is inspired since the two have much in common---eating junk food is the nutritional equivalent of a home cluttered with junk.
First, I really liked the graphic design of this book. It's paperback format is oversized and the pages have a spacious, inviting feel. The lines are spaced with extra leading so large sections of copy don't feel ponderous and overwhelming. Generous amounts of white space enhance the approachability of this 260 page book. In short, it's an easy read.
Another intelligent element of this book is the author's knowledge that any form of habit-breaking program needs outside support in order to succeed. Unless there are others providing some oversight to our efforts, it's human nature to back-slide. She accurately points out that 95% of people will likely achieve a goal if they have specific accountability with a person to whom they are committed (think Alcoholics Anonymous here). A website [...] provides support and tools, including a free downloadabale companion workbook, to help keep your decluttering efforts on the straight and narrow.
Marrero spends a considerable portion of the book devoted to the psychological aspects of cluttering. Procrastination is, she says, the major reason why people clutter. Procrastination robs you of your energy (it's called the karm of incompletions). Specific exercises are provided to overcome the various mental barriers to leading an organized life....
Besides the obvious clutter---Beanie Baby collections, stacks of magazines, clothes you haven't fit in since college, that junky crap that you get for free---Marrero addresses other forms of "clutter" in our lives. Time clutter is a subject that could (and has) been the subject of a book all on its own. The author provides a 12-Step Program called Overdoers Anonymous to tackle the time clutter problem.
There's also the exponentially increasing problem of modern life she calls Communication Clutter---emails, junk mail, spam, telemarketers, and all that other inconsequential and unimportant online and telecommunications "stuff" that eats away at the time we have here on earth.
The back of the book includes room by room "recipes" with the "ingredients" for successful decluttering. There's a lot of meat here (to use the author's food analogies) and also requires the most actual physical work. So it's not an easy section to get through.
There's a lot of take-away in this book that more than justifies its price. I've read two other highly recommended books about getting rid of clutter in your life and learned a lot. But this is the best book on the subject by far, in my opinion. Start here before you look anywhere else.Read more ›
I've read several "clean up the clutter" guides recently, including "It's All Too Much" by Peter Walsh, and this book stacks up well against all the recent titles. I really liked Lorie Marrero's "hook"--that organizing your home is a lot like learning to eat well--because it takes into account both the short-term and long-term aspects of combating clutter. Anyone who's interested in buying a book like this is probably facing a fairly serious situation and needs immediate help, but needs a longer-term framework or philosophical approach too in order to stay uncluttered. Marrero's diet analogy works on both counts: you can go on a "clutter diet" to make an immediate, noticeable impact, but then you maintain your new "physique" (your less-cluttered home) through consistently-applied new behaviors. In short, I really liked the book, I liked the writing and tone (it read as if the author was walking through my house with me, giving suggestions and moral support), I liked the helpful format, and I definitely recommend this book to anyone seeking help in getting their stuff under control.
While there is some extremely valuable information contained in this book, the constant references to "our paid clients", etc. are offensive and distracting for those who truly want to apply the ideas. Apparently if I am really smart, I will apply their "ruler" to my situation and just pay some one to fix my situation and add this book to the "give away" pile!
I have decided not to let the repetitive "commercials" prevent me from getting my money's worth out of the book I already paid for though. After eleven chapters of the propaganda, I just took a minute to get a piece of card stock and a marker and am "editing" out the references so I can use the information without the insinuations that i need to spend more money on the author's website subscriptions or services or cannot apparently apply the information without them!
The Clutter Diet: The Skinny on Organizing Your Home and Taking Control of Your Life With Lori's metaphor of dieting, you could say this book is all about waste reduction for your house, if you'll pardon the pun. Her different take on an old topic gives it a freshness that helps to distinguish it from the crowd of other organizing books out there. And just like the other type of dieting, Lori takes us through the key steps we need to take to get started - and to stay on track - to reduce the clutter in our lives, from finding the motivation, to getting the education we need on how to do it, to knowing where and how to find the support we need to keep it all going. The book has lots of simple but practical tips and techniques (food shopping? Get the family to write things down once they need to be replaced and only buy what's on your grocery list), together with a handy 'Clutter Fitness Exercise' at the end of each chapter to reinforce what we've learned. She also helps us strip the fat away from less tangible modern-day clutter that tends to accumulate in the form of junk mail, email spam and the results of poor time management. (Check out the excellent tip on using the Rules engine in Outlook). The final section of the book nicely reinforces the dieting metaphor with a selection of 'recipes' that are full of ideas on organizing and keeping control of specific rooms and important spaces in your house, whether it's your home office or your utility room. A pleasant layout and (of course) uncluttered design make this book easy to use and enjoyable to read. One small area for improvement: It might have been a good idea to include an Index, especially given the book's topic.
