If the housing crisis is keeping you in your current home longer than you expected, maybe it's time to get your house in order.

Why bother?

The National Association of Professional Organizers says organized people save time and money and they live with reduced stress and frustration levels.

The money savings alone is enough to heed the advice of professional organizational extroverts who want to help get the orderly you out of the closet -- so you can clean it and the rest of your home.

Here's what they advise.

Take the current opportunity to organize. It's a good time to organize now, especially if you aren't going to moving anytime soon. Organize now and when it's time to go, you'll know exactly where everything is located. That will make for a smooth move.

Your home wasn't cluttered in a day. Understand cleaning, removing the clutter from and organizing a 1,500 square foot storage bin (your home) is going to take more time than it took you to come up with a plan to clean house.

The popular refrain, "I might need it someday," is an excuse to put off until tomorrow getting rid of something you won't use today or anytime soon. If you haven't used it in six months or more, chances are, you won't ever.

Start small. Real small. Sign up with "FlyLady" Marla Cilley and let her tell you what to do. Daily Missions assign you to a small task each day in one of a half dozen "Home Zones".

Instead of a hodgepodge, willy-nilly system of bins and baskets and shelves and racks that don't mesh, consider one sane, organized, built-in or matching storage system. Do-it-yourself or hire out. The once-and-for-all proposition can be used to organize everything in a given room (say, garage or office), closet, nook or cranny, according to Bill West, author of "Your Garagenous Zone: The Complete Garage Organizer Guide" and a partner Web site, Garagez.com.

Delegate. Send the kids to their room and Pop to the garage as you take on the kitchen. Give specific instructions to your troops. Tell the kids to pick up their clothes and put them in the hamper or make their beds. Tell Pop to hang the tools and sort the trash from the recyclables. You get to choose your own kitchen job.

During hard-core efforts to organize, take a few minutes every hour to reward yourself while taking stock of the task at hand. Over a cup of joe, make a list of what's yet to be done, prioritize it, spend a few minutes on breathing exercises, hug the babies, kiss your husband and get back to work with renewed spirit, says Cilley. The exercise prevents headless-chicken behavior by keeping a plan at hand.

Teaching is one of the best ways to remember what you've learned. Consider becoming a professional organizer. Online Organizing offers a host of learning tools that can help you determine your organizing "personality" and if you have what it takes to be a pro.

Make money on your junk. Among the growing number of eBay Trading Assistants (TAs), there's probably one who can take at least some of that stuff off your hands and give you some cash for doing so. TAs are sort of like online consignment shops -- inlets instead of outlets. They will help you overcome your fears of selling online or the dread of garage sales and sell that stuff you don't want to "waste".

Bite the bullet, accept that you'll never get the job done on your own and hire an organizer. Visit the National Association of Professional Organizers for help from a service industry developed to help home owners and others organize. The association swears by the habit because, it says, organization breeds efficiency. Efficiency gives you more control over your surroundings and your life. Control allows you to get more done in less time. And, as you know, time is money.

Published: July 31, 2008

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Broderick Perkins parlayed a career in old-school journalism into a contemporary digital news service that really hits home. The award-winning consumer journalist, originally from Wilmington, DE, is founder, publisher and executive editor of the bootstrap DeadlineNews Group, a Silicon Valley-based editorial content and consulting service specializing in residential real estate, consumer news and related editorial consulting services. The DeadlineNews Group includes the website, DeadlineNews.com, offering real estate editorial content and consulting services, and its back shop, the Deadline Newsroom, an open house on news that really hits home. Perkins obtained his formal journalism education from University of Delaware and a journalism boot camp, the Institute of Journalism Education at the University of California-Berkeley. He went on to 20 years of service as a daily newspaper journalist at the Wilmington, DE News Journal and San Jose, CA Mercury News. Perkins covered housing on the San Jose Mercury News reporting team which earned a General News Reporting Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. He has also produced real estate, consumer and small business content for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, RealtyTimes.com, Nolo.com, Better Homes and Gardens, the National Association of Realtors, Homestore/Move and Intuit/Quicken among more than three dozen publications. In addition to managing the DeadlineNews Group, Perkins most recently served as chief editorial consultant for Nolo's Essential Guide To Buying Your First Home, Nolo, and writes real estate television scripts for RealtyTimes.com.