Getting It Together: How to Organize Your Work, Your Home and Yourself

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

For the organizationally challenged, Katz offers hope, motivation, and
dozens of specific how-to ideas. If your socks don’t match, you
can’t find the car keys, and your front hall could be mistaken for a
paper recycling depot, you’ll benefit from this guide. Organization,
Katz says, has nothing to do with neatness and nothing to do with
perfection. Do you own things, she asks, or are you owned by things?
Why, she wants to know, do you continue to buy, insure, maintain, and
clean things you don’t need? And having brought you to the brink where
you can see that “stuff” is soaking up your time and energy, she
gives you a blueprint to follow when you get the urge to purge.

Don’t agonize, organize, she exhorts as she marches the reader
through chapters on how to bring order from chaos in the kitchen, front
hall, kid’s room, car, hotel room, and even at a conference. Desks,
photo collections, meetings, briefcases, address books—none escapes as
she delivers a course on “dejunking.” Her ideas are applicable
whether the organizational war zone is the home, office, or community
group.

The book itself is nicely organized and appropriately uncluttered.
Katz’s style is jaunty, so the pace is reminiscent of a spring
cleaning. Simple pen-and-ink sketches and a good bibliography add the
finishing touches to a work that’s both fun and practical.