‘Organization’ is Her Middle Name

by Sabina Lohr
Reprinted with permission Southington Observer

Unlike the majority of us, Faith Manierre loves to organize. While most of us have allowed ourselves to become buried under a lifetime of accumulated stuff, Ms. Manierre has spent her life organizing what she has accumulated. When she learned that a career in organizing existed, she jumped in. “It was an immediate response,” she says.

Organization for home-based businesses is the focus of a presentation Ms. Manierre is giving on Wednesday, October 9 at the Southington Library. She will include advice on how to manage time, set goals, create filing systems, and other topics of interest to small business owners as well as anyone desiring more organization in their lives.

Ms. Manierre is the President of the Connecticut chapter in formation of the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO). She is the leader of the Glastonbury Chamber Small Business Strategies Group and the treasurer of the Glastonbury Business and Professional Women’s Club.

Manierre is also the owner of her own two-year-old home-based business, Busy Bees Professional Organizing, LLC. Approximately 60 percent of the people who come to Ms. Manierre for organizational advice are people who run businesses out of their homes, and 40 percent are individuals who need help with personal organization.

What is the most frequent problem Ms. Manierre sees with both small business clients as well as individuals? Lives burdened with too much paperwork.

At her workshops she will often pour a bag or box full of a month’s worth of mail onto a table. “People don’t realize how much mail is coming into your home,” she says. The enormous pile gives people a visual awakening to the burdening capacity of even mere envelopes. She helps clients create a system for handling their mail as well as paperwork in general.

Goal setting is another area Ms. Manierre covers. She finds that people may have very lofty goals, with the focus being the goal itself, not the process of reaching it. When the goals are too high, people become frozen along the climb. She teaches you how to break a goal into components and efficiently schedule the time needed to reach the goal.

Lack of time is another problem for which Ms. Manierre offers help. Because few women stay at home anymore, they don’t have time to organize the kitchen, their children’s clothes, and their homes and lives in general. This scarcity of time at home coupled with the affluence of our society equals too many possessions with too little time to organize them.

These possessions have the potential of overwhelming us. She shows you how to get the upper hand. Ms Manierre does not walk into your home or home business and enforce upon you her ideas on how you should organize.

She recognized that every client has a different value system. She will work with you in creating your own personal methods of handling your disorganization so that your new organizational skills will succeed for you over the long term.

With her seminar Ms. Manierre promises a lot of tips for businesses to increase productivity while saving time. If you’re not organized, she says, you’re losing money. Sign-in for her free presentation is at 8:00 a.m. with the presentation beginning at 8:15 a.m. For more information call the Southington Library at 628-0948 extension 2.