I love organizing stuff. For a while I considered become a professional organizer. There is a special joy in making a space cleaner and neater. (My 7 year old self does not believe I’m really saying this.) Organizing for yourself is easier, I think, than organizing for someone else. You know where you’ll look to find things. You know what makes sense to you. You know you’re always going to take your shoes off first thing in the door so why bother putting the shoe rack any where else?

If you organize for somebody else though things get sticky. It doesn’t matter where you put your shoes in your house if you’re organizing someone else’s front hall. Sure you could put the shoe rack there and it would look great with all those shoes you put on it for a week, maybe two. But if your client doesn’t ever take off shoes until reaching the bedroom it won’t get used. That shoe rack you so carefully placed becomes just another shelf to dump random stuff on.

So what do you do?