Have you tried to organize a million times only to find clothes spilling out of your closet, beauty products piled up helter-skelter on the bathroom counter, and forgotten items lost in the never-regions behind pantry jumbles again and again?

Maybe it’s not that bad. Your living room may look picture perfect. But you never let anyone enter behind closed doors in dump spaces like the garage, the basement, or the spare room where clutter prevails in every corner.

Either way, you’re not a lost cause! 

You just haven’t found your personal organizing style. 

Not everyone organizes like perfectionist Marie Kondo. Kondo represents only one of four home organizing styles according to professional organizer, Cassandra Aarseen.

I came across Aarseen when I was looking for solutions to paper clutter, having had an important bill disappear into a pile for the umpteenth time. Discovering my own organizing style has made a big difference in my life.

Curious to discover your style? Let’s explore.

The Birth of the Four Home Organizing Styles

Aarseen has been a professional organizer for more than a decade. 

In the beginning, Aarseen made her clients an incredible offer. If their kitchen, closet, or garage, whatever area she had tackled for them, didn’t stay organized for thirty days, she would return and re-organize it for free.

She felt surprised and perplexed when return requests flowed in. But she kept her bargain. On the other hand, her husband objected—she couldn’t keep giving up her time for free! He even wanted her to give up her brand new and much loved profession.

Fortunately, Aarseen had a breakthrough.

One day, while responding to a return organizing request, she found her client, an attorney, with file folders strewn across her home office floor. She had liberated them from their neat file box home to never be returned.

A light bulb went off in Aarseen’s mind.

The attorney needed to see her project folders to keep account of them. She could not bear to have them hidden; it wasn’t her natural organizing style.

With this insight in mind, Aarseen attached several attractive magazine-style racks to one wall of the office—one for each current project. That did the trick. The attorney never called her back to re-organize again.

In time, Aarseen identified two dimensions of organizing that combined led to her four home organizational styles.

They are:

• Visual vs. Hidden

• Detailed vs. Global

She assigned cute but also symbolic names to the resulting four styles to create her system: Butterfly, Bee, Ladybug, and Cricket.

Aarseen began to identify each new client’s organizing style and organized their spaces accordingly. As a result, she stopped receiving return organizing requests. Her business boomed and she has also been the co-star of the “Hot Mess Home” home organization television series.

So what kind of organizing bug are you?

The Four Organizing Styles

You see, you’re not necessarily messy. You’ve probably tried to home organize according to someone else’s style and it didn’t work. It wasn’t your natural style.

So start by considering this:

• Are you visual or do you prefer your possessions to be out-of-sight? Does out-of-sight, out-of-mind ring a bell for you? Do you buy duplicate items because you can’t see the ones you have on the back of your shelf? Or does too much stuff in your visual field create anxiety for you?

• Are you detailed oriented or do you prefer broad categories? For example, do you want separate cubbyholes for back-up toothpaste, toothbrushes, and dental floss or would you be happy to drop them quickly into one container?

With this in mind, let’s look at the four home organizing types and the kinds of solutions that work best for each one.

Butterfly — A Butterfly is a visual organizer and prefers broader categories when sorting. Clear bins with labels but no tops, hooks, and open shelving are ideal solutions for a Butterfly.

Bee—Also a visual organizer, a Bee prefers detailed categories. Clear bins stacked on top of one another, clear jars, peg board organizers, and open shelving are your thing as long as the items are sorted into smaller categories.

Ladybug—A Ladybug prefers to have her everyday items hidden out-of-sight but she needs broader categories so she can, for example, just chuck an item into an open bin—for example, all the over-the counter medicines in one basket rather than sorted by type. Solid containers with labels, cube shelving, and bins without lids work well for you.

Cricket—Also a hidden organizer, a Cricket wants to sort her possessions into fine categories. Opaque containers with lids and labels, binders and traditional filing systems, and closed cabinets with storage containers inside keep your things nicely hidden and sorted to ad infinitum.

You might have hit on your organizing immediately just reading these short explanations. But if you’re still not sure, take Aarseen’s Clutterbug™ quiz to find out.

I prefer visual simplicity and broad categories, which makes me mostly a Ladybug. There are a few things I need to keep in sight—like vitamins—or I will indeed forget them entirely.

Concluding Thoughts

Marie Kondo created a revolution in home organization with her bestseller, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. But her system didn’t work for everyone. 

That’s why I prefer Aarseen’s approach, which helps you identify your natural organizing style based on these two elements:

• Visual vs. Hidden

• Detailed vs. Global

Combined, they add up to four different home organizing types.

There’s more to learn about each of the four types and its unique tendencies. But just knowing there are different home organizing styles can save you from unnecessary self-criticism and start you on the road to a better organized home.

[Photo by RODNAE Productions]

Thank you for your presence, I know your time is precious!  Don’t forget to  sign up for Wild Arisings, my twice monthly letters from the heart filled with insights, inspiration, and ideas to help you connect with and live from your truest self. 

You might also like to check out my  Self-Care Shop. May you be happy, well, and safe – always.  With love, Sandra