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At home, our personal space flows into our work space. Don’t let i Laundry belongs in the laundry room. Dishes belong in the kitchen. Mai belongs in a designated mail area. None of these things belong on you desk. Almost all of my respondents said their cluttering got worse where they worked at home. Even if you don’t have a separate room for an office, there is hope. Mary French was profiled in the Wail Street Journal for her philanthropic project of putting a dictionary into the hands of every third- grader in South Carolina (www.dictionatyproject.org). She works from a Lble in her living room. Still, she keeps personal mail and clutter from ntruding. She’s learned the “sacred space” principle of keeping only things bat belong in one place.

“I keep only business-related items on the table. don’t have a PDA. I keep everything in my head.”
“Others in the household may also have the tendency to use the workspace designated for the home office and leave items behind on the desk. So not only is there the challenge of keeping the business stuff organized, but you are constantly moving other family stuff out of the way so you can work.”
—Nancy Kruschke, Professional Organizer

By eliminating the boundaries between your kid’s lives and yours, you are just encouraging and teaching them to clutter. Your kids may be the reason you work, but they are not part of the work. Give them their own space. Doing so will teach them boundaries and a sense of organization. It will help them make natural separations with less stress.

Mary had a couple of problems. Behind every good intention, there is a shadow intention. Briefly, our Shadow Self is like a sack of “ought to” we carry around with us. We “ought to” be devoted to our kids. The good intention was to have more time with her daughter. The shadow intention was the fear that she couldn’t balance work and home life any better at home than when she worked in the corporate world.
Her solution seemed to be logical. A clutterer priding herself on being logical is like a baseball pitcher priding himself on his batting ability.
Mary’s situation was difficult, but not unsolvable. By setting up an “office” in Samantha’s room, with places for her crayons, scissors, paper, books, school notebooks, etc., it gave her a sense of her own place. To help her overcome Samantha’s initial feelings of rejection, Mary dropped in to several times a day to see how she was doing for the first few weeks. Samantha began to appreciate having her own space and eventually asked
Mary to “stop interrupting her work.” From the mouths of babes.