Messy: Professional consultant helps two organize their desks

VIRGINIA BEACH

Helen and Ron Lee's three-bedroom house has a soothing view of the pond that winds through the Cypress Point Country Club.

Their living room offers a multicultural mélange of carefully arrayed artwork: one wall displaying a leather-made image of a Curacao woman's face with spirals of windblown hair, another outfitted with brightly colored Native American paintings and embroidery.

Take a right after you walk into the house, though, and you're headed toward what Helen not-so-lovingly calls "the pigsty." When they have company, the door to Ron's study is shut to conceal the horrors.

If only Ron Lee spent his free hours patronizing the golf course a block away, maybe the room would be neater. But he doesn't golf.

His No. 1 passion is the Shriners organization. Lee, a retired systems analyst who spent 20 years in the Navy, serves as an officer with two Shriners groups. It used to be four.

Which explains why visitors see double upon entering the dark, cramped study. Two desks. Two computers. Two printers and scanners. One each for Shriners work and personal stuff.

His personal desk, caked with papers a couple of inches high, holds coffee receipts, medical forms, half-finished Sudoku puzzles, and a stray Shriners program and order sheet. An eight-compartment "tower" close by is crammed with CDs, years-old computer magazines and a shoebox filled with canceled checks from the '70s.

The Shriners side of his 13-by-13-foot study is even more disheveled. Aside from the desk clutter, Lee has an open suitcase on a nearby table and another on the floor to the right of his desk, both teeming with Shriners paraphernalia.

One morning, he lifted a few folders at the far end of the desk to reveal a covered turntable spinning soundlessly. "How long has that been on?" he wondered.

Maybe it's simply his resistance to the act of discarding. ("I do subscribe to the theory that as soon as you throw something out, you're going to need it again.") Maybe it's psychologically deeper - a rebellion against the days of spick-and-span military discipline.

Whatever the cause, Lee knew there was a problem and cried out for help.

He agreed to a one-hour session with Catherine Cantieri, a workplace organizer from Portsmouth who runs a business called Sorted.

Cantieri approaches her task with the demeanor of a cheerleader, not a schoolmarm. Clutter, she said, "doesn't mean that you're a bad person. You just don't have a system that works for you."

She had a system rather early in life.

"I was a very creepy child," Cantieri confessed. "I always had to-do lists that were color-coded."

She swears she doesn't grit her teeth and tighten her stomach when she enters the world of mess. "I think, 'OK, I can't wait to see what it looks like when we're all done,' " Cantieri said. "It's like sitting down to a really rich meal."

Cantieri started at the non-Shriners desk, the one closest to the door.

"I always joke: Clean mind, clean desk - take your pick," Lee, 70, said in defense of his collections. "I've got thousands and thousands of things piled up that I can't decide what to do with."

Cantieri offered her first lesson: "In any office, the desk is prime real estate. That is why every single thing needs to earn its keep. And I think some of this is not prime-real-estate worthy."

Then, together, they plunged into the detritus, item by item.

A receipt from the Keurig coffee company. Lee had kept it to know what types of coffee to order next time.

Time to unveil Cantieri's major organizing tool - the "action file index" - consisting of a set of folders, a container to hold them and a dry-erase board to hang on the case listing the contents.

The Keurig receipt would go into a folder labeled "To purchase."

"I haven't thought about it in that particular way," Lee said. "That works well."

Cantieri directed Lee to make other action folders for material he'd come back to - Shriners documents still to be entered as minutes for a board meeting, an insurance form to be discussed with his wife. Others, such as a graph of results of a political survey, she had less tolerance for.

Cantieri: "Did it tell you anything you didn't know?"

Lee: "No. But I kind of like to look at it."

Out it went.

She was more forgiving of a contribution request from a charity, placing it in a folder labeled "donations," though Cantieri said Lee could avoid the paper by donating online.

They next uncovered a couple of pieces of Mensa stationery. Lee is a member of the high-IQ society. "I don't often advise this," Cantieri said, "but perhaps we should put this to the side so we have some space."

Helen Lee was at a water-aerobics class during the cleanup. "I love him dearly," she had said earlier, "but he's a mess." She came to the United States from England with one suitcase in 1965, so she knows how to throw things out.

"I used to be a neatnik, but I got over it," she said. "It's like flogging a dead horse. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."

Midway through the cleanup, Ron Lee looked longingly at a half-completed Sudoku puzzle that had surfaced. "If I'm bored for a few minutes, I'll work on an old Sudoku," he said. "I hate to leave one unfinished."

Under Cantieri's watchful gaze, he disposed of it.

"It's a hard thing to do, throwing stuff out," Lee said. "I don't know why."

Trying to diagnose his problem, Cantieri wondered about his family's experience during the Depression. More pertinent, perhaps, was his career in the Navy.

"If you move every three years, you have to pitch a lot of stuff," Lee said. "I did have a structure for so long. Part of me rebels at that."

They soldiered on, filing papers in his cabinet or the action file index, trashing others.

Cantieri: "I'm starting to see a bit of desk."

Lee: "I don't know what the heck that is."

She prescribed an in-box to help tame the flurry of incoming paper and a multimedia compartment to store the discs, headphones and other hardware strewn across his desk.

"One of the maxims of organization is, if you don't know where it is or you can't get to it, you might as well not have it," she said.

Lee also had to do something about the pens - three cups' worth, plus others scattered front and rear. Get rid of the ones you don't use or like, she advised. Put the rest in one cup or divide them between two based on color.

When the hour was up, the non-Shriners desk was still covered in paper, but the coating was thinner. They hadn't tackled the other desk. Or the suitcases. Or the tower - though Cantieri had assured him: "I can tell you fairly definitively that checks 30 years old can be expunged."

But you can do only so much in 60 minutes. Cantieri said a full office cleanup usually takes two four-hour sessions.

She declared herself satisfied. They had made "a dent."

"I've seen much worse," Cantieri said.

"I wish my wife was here to hear that," Lee said.

P.S. At a return visit nearly five weeks after the cleanup:

Lee had a good excuse for not having made significant advancement. For nearly 3-1/2 of those five weeks, he'd been on a cruise with Helen to Europe.

Still, the front part of his desk was eerily in order, exposing bare wood but for a pair of computer books (so he could design a Shriners Web site) and a spread of business cards. No papers.

"Now I have a flat surface most of the time," Lee said proudly.

His biggest achievement: avoiding amassing new piles. "I've learned to process it quickly before I lay it down. Because when I lay it down, it's insurmountable." That lesson also has carried over to the kitchen table.

The rear of the desk still betrayed clutter, such as electronics gadgets. He hadn't yet gotten the multimedia compartment and in-box that Cantieri had recommended. But Lee had discarded the loose pens and collected all of the highlighters in one of the three mugs.

Elsewhere in the study, the Shriners desk remained sketchy and the tower still stood stocked with ingredients such as ancient checks.

Helen Lee acknowledged progress, though she hasn't lost the occasional urge to shut the door.

"I feel positive about the whole thing," her husband said. "I would hope that in three months I would have it under control.

"I'm working on it."

Philip Walzer, (757) 222-3864, phil.walzer@pilotonline.com tips to whip your desk into shape

For Catherine Cantieri, clutter equals delayed decision-making. "Every messy desk has this in common: I don't know what to do," she said.

Cantieri, 38, spent 15 years in marketing and communications, including a spell as a copy editor and wire editor at The Daily Press, before starting her organizing business, Sorted, earlier this year. Here are some of her suggestions for getting your desk in shape:

 

• "You've got to have a system. It doesn't have to be NASA in its level of complexity. But you have to have some way of processing stuff coming in, acting on it, filing it or getting rid of it."
• Use a "bull's-eye" approach: "Treat your desk and the area right around your chair as the most important real estate in your office. That's where the stuff you touch the most goes. The stuff you almost never touch - that can go clear across the room in the file storage."
• "Don't fight yourself; you'll never win." Cantieri herself doesn't feel comfortable drafting online to-do lists, so she does them by hand.
• "Recognize the limits of reality." If you have a small desk, you're going to have to be more ruthless in getting rid of paper.
• "Don't think of it as, 'I'm being bad or good.' " A messy desk is not an indicator of fallen virtue.
• "Organization is just a way of helping you," she said. "Stuff is there to serve you. You shouldn't be there to serve it."
• More tips are available on her Web site, www.get-sorted.net.