Organizational expert Deniece Schofield will give advice

Fighting with your kids over where they drop their backpacks after school? Arguing with a spouse over who's supposed to sort laundry or pick up the snacks for the school party?

To run a household, you need to be organized and efficient. Deniece Schofield learned those lessons the hard way, amid the chaos of running a house that included a husband and five children.

Today, she's an expert on organization and household management. She leads seminars across the country and has been a spokesperson for Procter & Gamble and contributor to national magazines.

Schofield said everything she learned came from trial and error. She'll share her secrets -- and her early mistakes -- during seminars Tuesday in Cape Girardeau. Sessions, for which there is a cost, are from 10 a.m. to noon or from 7 to 9 p.m. at Drury Lodge.

Today it sounds almost silly to tell people they have to get organized -- PDAs, day planners, cell phones, pagers and e-mails keep everyone on task. Or so it seems.

"People think I'm compulsive and anal and wouldn't let you sit or stand or walk in my home except where there's plastic," Schofield said. But that's not the case at all. "You can overdo organizing and that makes home a place people leave when they want to enjoy themselves."

Instead, she believes that organized people can eliminate some stress in their lives and will find more free time for the things they enjoy. People who aren't organized are probably more frantic and flustered, she says.

"You're insane if you don't do it," she said during a telephone interview from her Cedar Rapids, Iowa, home.

People have to think creatively when they start to organize their homes and lives. Not everything should be used for its intended use only. "I've heard everything" from using toilet bowl brushes to wipe dust from the corners of carpeting or using elastic hair wraps to keep wrapping paper rolls from unrolling, Schofield said.

But her favorites are "101 uses for coffee filters that have nothing to do with coffee."

In her book "Confessions of an Organized Homemaker," Schofield explains how she became such an organizational guru and offers tips for how others can follow her example.

"When I got organized in 1974, there weren't any books on the subject and no programs on TV or products in the store you could buy," she said. She learned by hitting bottom and trying to climb her way back up.

She made lists of everything that needed to work better than her current systems and then was determined to keep trying new ideas until she found the best one.

She gives an example in the book: To keep her children's toys organized, she got a toybox. But that meant that not everything fit in the toybox and her children kept taking all the toys out to find their favorites. So she tried drawstring bags to keep like toys together; that didn't work either. Finally she started using open containers like cardboard boxes and plastic bins that could easily slide off a shelf and let the child see the toys inside.

"I talked to friends if I was stuck on an idea and sometimes those ideas would be a springboard to another idea that did work."

Schofield says that sometimes people make organization a tougher task than it needs to be. Most people want to do everything at once. She suggests starting small and staying determined. "I didn't wake up and become organized. We all have bad habits," she said. Her organizational skills "were born out of frustration."

But over the years, she's learned that people need to be intentional about their organization. You can't just go to the store and buy a plastic bin hoping it will make you better organized. You have to think about how you use items in your home, where you use them and where they're stored and where they fit.

She keeps the dishes in several kitchen cabinets, not just one. "The glasses are by the sink and with the dishes closest to the refrigerator." How often do you just reach for a glass without getting something from the refrigerator or ice from the freezer? she said.

The rule is to store items nearest to the point you use them. Reorganizing the kitchen and closets are often the hardest in a home because of storage issues, but Schofield suggests boxing unused or infrequently used items.

There are plenty of silly kitchen gadgets that take up cabinet space, like the electric butter melter dispenser her mother-in-law once gave her, Schofield said. Those items don't need to stay in the kitchen; the goal is to not waste time and effort on things that are a hassle to use.

During the seminar she'll offer tips on how to find more space without throwing things out and how to manage time and floating paper that gets shuffled around a house.

The questions she's most often asked are about how to organize husbands, kids and paper, Schofield said. Sometimes there aren't good answers to those questions.

But as the mother of four children, Schofield knows that the organizational lessons do sink in. When her two oldest sons left for college, they were "hopeless slobs," she said. She thought they'd missed her lessons, but by the time her fourth son went away, she knew her lessons worked. Her son was on a plane talking to a man about the system of organization he learned. "It was never in evidence when he lived here," she said. But the younger that parents start teaching children about order and organization, the better chance of reaping the rewards. "Just don't give up."

ljohnston@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 126