Current Fave

This is my current favorite organizing item. It is a caddy for children's art supplies. I like this one, from Target, because it is bright red and a perfect size for toddlers or older kids. It can easily hold an assortment of pens, crayons, paints, stickers and even small pads of paper.
Place this type of caddy in the center of your child's art/project table to keep supplies easily accessible and easy to put away. As you know, easy clean-up is an essential or for organizing any child's play area. The handle makes this tote-able so you can create an art area anywhere at a moments notice.

Simplicity on Display

In a recent project, I worked with a woman who was trying to figure out what to do with her abundance of framed photos. My client had a vast array of framed pictures of friends and family going back many years. She even had some very important vintage photos of great-grandparents. However, she was at her wits end trying to find places to display all these various photos in their chaotic assortment of frames. She was craving order and serenity. The solution: Three large collage-style frames with lots of openings of a fairly uniform size.
We went through all the pictures and pulled out a few that could go away in albums or didn't need to be kept. The frames were put aside to be sold at their next garage sale or re-purposed to frame pictures of their baby for family. All remaining photos were put in a pleasing order in the three large frames. The frames were mounted on a wall in her office. Gone was the distraction of so many frame sizes and styles. The uniform openings create harmony and the simple arrangement is easy on the eye. One can focus solely on the images displayed. The effect was an orderly, serene display of dear memories and precious loved ones.

Sunny Los Angeles

I had a great trip to Los Angeles, organizing an art room, a memoir writing project, and a home office. The common thread I found is that each client knows so well what he or she needs. The work is so rewarding when we come up with solutions together and figure out what is truly the best organizing system for each person. And so often, the biggest change comes from the smallest shift. I am very appreciative of the honesty, hard work, and diligence each of my clients brings to the work we do together. You can find notes on these projects under "Recent Projects."

Photos organizing for Moms

A friend wrote me and asked for suggestions about organizing photos of the kids. She is a new Mac user and a mother of two. Macs come with iPhoto, which you probably already know. It is quite easy to hook your camera up directly to the Mac and upload your pictures automatically to iPhoto, which organizes them by date and gives you a chance to title groups of pictures as you go. There is some very simple organizing it offers that can help you keep track. This electronic storage then serves as "negatives" of your pictures.

My biggest tip is this: delete a lot! It is sooooo easy to take digital pictures, we tend to take ten times as many pictures as we did with ol' fashioned film cameras. So...Delete, delete, delete. Only keep the really great pictures or you will soon have hundreds or even thousands of pictures saved.

Many of moms also have lots of album projects they are trying to get to. My advice is to start with the most RECENT. Don't try and go back ten years and make all those yearly albums you never got around to. Make the one that you can relate to NOW. You will have more enthusiasm for it. You will have a task you can start and finish. You wont get bogged down in the tedium of going backwards which can just be overwhelming. Do what is current and perhaps at some time, you will get to the older projects.

Put all the rest of those printed pictures in a nice photo storage box, well labeled. Insert the label cards with the years, so you can quickly go back to specific years or seasons, if you choose to do a project at some later time. But for now, just put those away.

If your pictures are not printed but only stored on the computer, archive them by saving them to discs or flash drives and storing them safely away, again, well labeled.

The main thing is don't go backwards, go forward! And enjoy.

I will be in Los Angeles in June!

As many of you know, I recently relocated to sunny and rainy Northern California, where I have been pursuing my Masters Degree in Organization Development at Sonoma State University.

I am making regular trips down to Los Angeles, however, to keep up with my organizing work with clients. Please let me know if you are interested in some work this June when I'm there!

Welcome to my new website!

Talia Eisen is an entrepreneur who has worked as a professional organizer for more than ten years. She has her own business, Clarity Professional Organizing, with clients in Los Angeles, New York, New Orleans, Colorado and the Bay Area. Her organizing has spanned everything from individual, one-on-one coaching, to working with large corporations on systemic redesigns. She has also specialized in helping other entrepreneurs start their businesses.

The experience of working closely with people who desire change in their lives inspired Talia’s interest in Organization Development. With her background in the creative arts (She holds a BFA from University of Southern California), and her 17 years experience working in corporations and for herself, Talia has a broad perspective on the needs of businesses and individuals within those systems. Talia has strong interpersonal skills and leadership experience, which she looks forward to bringing into her consulting work.