Testimonials: Columns
“Angela Hoxsey is an organizational Maven. She is fast, efficient and a pleasure to work with. Angela makes getting and staying organized easy with her helpful tips, tricks and knowledge of organizational products. I hired Angela to help me prior to and after a large home remodel. She helped me to declutter, purge and organize multiple rooms in my home. I loved working with Angela, she helped me streamline my home and I enjoy the organizational benefits everyday! ”
Susanne Hudson, Napa, CA
“I’m thrilled with what you helped create. It totally blows my mind how quickly you work and I love your thought process. Fantastic!!”
Dona Bonick, Kopol Bonick Photography, Napa CA
“Angela is always thinking about my organizing issues and often sends suggestions and helpful advice and ideas, even when she is not physically on the job with me. She comes up with unique solutions completely customized to my business, home and personal style—things that I never would have thought of on my own...”
“I can totally trust Angela’s taste and rely on her honesty about what’s working and what’s not with regards to my wardrobe. That said, she is always respectful—if I say I want to keep something, she respects my wishes...”
“I have a lot of “stuff”, and Angela has always been non-judgmental about my collections, while helping me to make smart decisions about how to lose things that I do not need. I value her wisdom, her experience and her perspective. She is a joy to work with, I look forward to our time together and dread to think what my home, closet, garage, life would look like without her expert guidance!”
T. Beller, Verve Napa Valley
“Angela is my dream girl! I was referred to her to help me prepare to move after living in one house for 27 years. She was fantastic in helping me get organized and declutter years of gathering too much of everything...!”
“Angela took me from panic, and an overwhelming moving experience, to an organized new home. She is a pleasure to work with, has lots of energy, while always maintaining a positive attitude. I think she is "THE BEST"!!!”
Sheila Sosnow, Piedmont, CA
“Have you ever accidentally run across someone who just COMPLETELY changed your every day life for the better? And you couldn't imagine your life without them? That's how I feel about Angela. Angela came into my fairly organized but slightly hectic life completely by chance. I wasn't looking for anyone to help me organize or streamline my life because I didn't really think I NEEDED it. And just in the same way that she seemed to just quietly float into my life, she helped me with such kindess, grace and ease.”
Lindsey Wiseman, St. Helena, CA
“Angela has a real gift for seeing what needs to be done and pulling it all together. I have worked with many organizers in the past, but none as efficient and focused as she. From my office to the garage, Angela has helped create a system that works
for the long term!”Karen Schuppert, Napa, CA
“Angela Hoxsey was the best referral that I have ever gotten. Needing to get my house ready to sell and declutter the 20 years worth of accumulation was no easy task. She was fast, efficient and a joy to work with. The best part of working with her was her cheerful yet no nonsense way of getting you to decide 'keep, trash or donate'. . . Love it!”
Cherie Melka, St. Helena, CA
“We spent four hours organizing an enormous amount of paperwork and I feel like I just got a massage!”Joanne Maher, St. Helena, CA
“Whether you are prone to chaos, pretty organized yourself, or a combination of both, Angela Hoxsey can help you bring order to your home. Yes, you could do it yourself, but most of us have so many competing demands on our time that organizing tasks easily fall by the wayside. Angela has brought her professional touch to my home, demonstrating every time
the lasting value of an expert.”Karen Saeger, Ph.D., Berkeley
“You can smell the sanity. Angela is worth her weight in diamonds.”
Masako Takahashi, artist;
San Miguel de Allende/San Francisco
Columns
Rate Your Organizing IQ
Give a little thought to the following scenarios and rate your organizing IQ.
1. Do you relentlessly research every single purchase, from big purchases like a vehicle to small buys like a bottle of hand cream? An organized person intuitively senses where to spend their time and energy. You might spend time over several weeks researching cars but could ask one or two beauty product-savvy friends what their favorite lotion is and be done with it.
2. Good enough is perfect. An organized person, over time, is able to identify how much time, money and energy to spend on a project before declaring it finished and moving on to the next thing. A less organized person either obsesses about perfecting details and misses the big picture or pulls the big picture into a semblance of perfection and hides any mess. For example, she might spend three hours on a French pedicure but not bother to launder and iron her outfit. At the other extreme, a less organized person’s living room could be ready for Architectural Digest but closet and cupboard doors hide complete chaos. It’s a case of “outies” versus “innies.” Do you see your disorder, is it hidden or are you pretty orderly through and through?
3. Organized people designate homes for everything. There’s a place to put the keys and the hand bag. There’s a place for exercise clothes and they are separated from other clothes. Chances are, the kitchen drawers have dividers in them.
4. Organized people learn to delegate and ask for support. No one stays organized alone. In an organized family, everyone has tasks they are responsible for so that neither Mom nor Dad have to be Super Spouse/Parent. An organized entrepreneur learns when to let go and allow others to take on parts of the business or growth is stunted. We let go to grow.
5. If you can’t walk away from a sale empty-handed, you may not be organized. Have you heard that Steve Martin joke about investing in cardboard? He had to keep only two tons of it at his house. If a good buy (and another… and another…) start to overwhelm your space, is it really worth the pennies you saved?
6. Making decisions is not (usually) an agonizing process for organized people. Somehow, an organized person has gotten over the hump that blocks a lot of folks, which is thinking that every decision is going to be life-altering and permanent. Whom to marry, what job to take and where to go to college, demand the writing of a pro and con list at the very least. But if you weigh the pros and cons of everything from what to have for dinner to what earrings to wear, you’ll have trouble getting out the door, and habitually running late causes a landslide of organizing problems.
7. Sentimentality is a super sticky wicket. I’ve observed that the mostly highly organized people error on the side of anticipating the future over reviewing the past. They tend to be planners, not memorializers. An organized person might create the fabulous photo album immediately after the vacation, but then he turns his attention back to work and planning the next big thing. If you can’t part with your Led Zeppelin concert T-shirt (and you’re 65) or your baby’s burping cloths (and your baby is 35), you might be more organizationally challenged than the person who’s been drying their car with those kinds of things for 30 years.
There are a lot of tendencies and habits that make being orderly easier, but these are the biggies for me. How do you rate? Understanding what underlies your organizing issues is a big part of overcoming them, so start with number four and ask for help.