We all got clutter. We being Americans. I got a basement full of…stuff. Papers, mostly. Every piece of paper represents a half hour of my time, something I (at one time) wanted to remember or deal with. So I ignore it. Who has that kind of time? Only, a year or so later, the basement’s getting a bit full. Eventually it’ll have to be dealt with. Enter, clutter experts!

Excerpt (for the rest, go to CSM’s briliant good ol’fashioned quality journalism site):

If you’re one of the many Americans who can’t park your car in your garage because of the mounds of stuff lurking inside, fear not. Cherie Turner of Tallahassee, Fla., can relate.

After she started dating a man whose house was “always immaculate,” Ms. Turner vowed to rid herself of years of accumulated clutter – starting in her garage. “I opened the door and lugged everything … into the front yard. People were driving by and going through my stuff.” Turner says. She had to keep telling disappointed bargain hunters, “No, really, I’m not having a yard sale.” Three weekends later, her garage was clutter-free, and she started on her closets.

Turner credits support from the online community at The Clutter Diet with getting her all fired up about the process. (The website, which charges a $14.99 monthly fee, treats getting organized like a diet, monitoring progress with “clutter pounds lost” and assigning weekly tasks that are divided into a “meal.”) She believes that if she can get organized, anyone can.

“When I first moved away from home, my daddy came to stay [overnight] in my little apartment. The first thing he said to Mom was, ‘You know that room she used to have? Well, she has a whole apartment like that now,’ ” she says, laughing. “So, this has been a lifelong thing for me.”

It’s a lifelong thing for many Americans, say experts. Getting organized is a perennial on the country’s Top 10 New Year’s resolutions, right along with quitting smoking and...read the rest at CSM.