Why Conquer Clutter & Chaos?

The average American receives 49,060 pieces of mail in their lifetime, 1/3 of it is junk mail.

A 12-ft wall could be built from LA to NYC with paper thrown away annually.

One family can save approximately 3 trees per year by recycling newspapers. Four feet of a paper stack is equal to one tree.

Each year, an average 100 lbs. of waste is generated by an individual office worker.

The average employee at a desk uses between 150-250 lbs. of paper every year.

Paperwork has been voted the biggest burden for small businesses. 80% of papers that are filed are never referenced again.

An average 4583 lbs. of books and magazines are discarded annually by the average American.

Chronically disorganized people keep all books and magazines purchased. The average American buys 668 books and 9,000 magazines annually. That is equivalent to a small town library in the U.S. in one person's lifetime.

The Quill Filing Products Catalog contains these statistics:
- Record-keeping constitutes over 90% of the activity within offices.
- 45 new sheets of paper are generated each day by every U.S. office worker.
- More than 80% of the cost to maintain paper records is in the personnel-time required to retrieve and replace documents in the filing system.
- The personnel cost to handle records averages over 20 times the cost of the records themselves.
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The Wall Street Journal (March, 1997) reports the average U.S. executive wastes 6 weeks per year searching for misplaced information from messy desks and files. This equals 5 hours per week or one hour per day. At $60,000/year in salaries, that is nearly $8,000/year in wasted time on the job.

Stephanie Winston, author of The Organized Executive, estimates a manager loses 1 hour/day to disorder, costing the business up to $4,000/yr if earning $35,000/yr - or $8,125/yr at $65,000).

Another theory is that 10% of a manager's salary is lost to disorder in the office.

280 hours (7 weeks) per year are lost by workers seeking clarification due to poor communication.

Per management engineers, misfiled documents cost between $61-122 to be retrieved. The cost is calculated by the value of the person looking for the file, the person interrupted to find the
file, the space the file occupies, and the cost to recreate the file if it cannot be retrieved.

In the top 10 list of management wasters for the past 20 years is managing paper. Locating misfiled electronic data on the computer will soon join this list.

Office workers spend an average of 50% of their time working with hardcopy documents.

Daniel Stamp of Priority Management Systems of Bellevue, WA, states that the average office worker spends 36 minutes/day looking for misplaced papers.

The average American spends one year of their life looking for lost or misplaced items at home and in the office. US News and World Report

According to the American Demographic Society, Americans waste more than 9 million hours each day looking for lost and misplaced articles.

For every hour of planning, 3-4 hours are saved from redundancy, waiting for information, not being prepared and poorly managed tasks..

About 80% of the clutter in your home or office is a result of disorganization, not lack of space.

It costs an average of $10/square foot to store items in your home.

Cleaning professionals say that getting rid of excess clutter would eliminate 40% of the housework in an average home..

Using the correct organizational tools can save marketing costs of 27% and improve time management by 38%, according to Mobile Technology Products.