My Journey to Becoming a Professional Organizer for Busy Moms
Hi, I’m Sona.
I’m a professional organizer in Los Angeles, a mom, and someone who genuinely gets excited about organizing things.
But I definitely did not start out that way.
From a messy kid to a neat freak
As a kid, I used to shove all my clothes into my wardrobe and hold them in place while I closed the door so they wouldn’t all fall out.
My mom had a particular talent for opening that wardrobe on the exact days I was invited to a party. Everything would fall onto the floor, and she would say, “You can’t go until you organize everything.”
Oh, how mad it used to make me feel!
Fast-forward to high school, and somehow I had become the neatest kid on the block.
And ever since then, I’ve found very few things as satisfying as organizing.
The day I decided to become a professional organizer
Years later, a very close friend of mine was going through a difficult separation. Her husband had left, and after about a month, we decided it was time to pack his things, clear the space, and make the home feel like hers.
We were almost finished when she turned to me and said, “You should make a living out of this. You’re so good at it. I could have never done this.”
I said, “Of course you could! But yeah, I love organizing.”
She looked me dead in the eye and said, “No. I couldn’t. I’m serious.”
At the time, I genuinely didn’t understand.
Organizing felt so easy to me. How could someone not be able to do it? Over the next few months, I started to realize that something that felt incredibly easy to me could cause enormous anxiety for someone else.
I feel the same way about event planning, by the way. My friend, who can’t stand organizing rooms, loves planning events.
Go figure!
Apparently, everyone else had already figured this out
My friend wasn’t the first person to tell me I was good at this; people had been saying it for years. A friend would open a closet to pick an outfit, the pantry to get us snacks, or the garage to grab our bikes, and I would completely zone out and start mentally playing Tetris with their belongings. That should go there. Those could be grouped together. Why is that shelf being used for that? I would organize their drawers, closets, shelves, and garages in my head. But this time, when my friend said it, something suddenly clicked.
I had just come out of a 17-year marriage and was trying to figure out what came next. Two days after that conversation, I bought the domain for The Minimalist Me and built the website. It felt like a no-brainer. People say that if you can make a living doing something that comes naturally to you, you get to play for the rest of your life. Who doesn’t want to play? And organizing was different from all those other interests. It wasn’t just something I liked. It was part of me. It was in my DNA. If I’m home and I’m not cooking or dancing, I am most likely organizing something. It calms my mind. It makes me happy. It gives me a sense of control. And even now, I still get butterflies the night before working with a client because I’m thinking about what I get to organize the next day.
What working inside real family homes taught me
When I started this business, I thought I was going to organize people’s homes. What I learned pretty quickly is that the room itself is only part of the problem. A lot of the women who call me are not people who have always been disorganized. In fact, many of them used to be very organized. Then life changed. Marriage. Kids. More belongings. Fuller schedules. More responsibilities. More people using the same spaces. The systems that once worked stopped working. And that’s an important distinction, because getting organized once is not the same thing as creating a home that is actually easy to keep organized. That is the part I care about most.
I organize around the way you actually live
I don’t walk into a home with one organizing system that I repeat everywhere.
I pay attention to how your family actually functions.
What do you use constantly? What do you keep losing? What keeps piling up? What have you organized before, only to watch it fall apart again?
The best organizing system isn’t always the prettiest or cleverest one.
It’s the one your family will actually use.
My sociology background at UCLA probably has something to do with how fascinated I am by all of this. I pay attention to people, patterns, behavior, and the way a household actually functions - not just what fits inside a pretty container.
The goal is for everything to have a place, for everyone to know where things go, and for putting the house back together to feel realistic.
When a crazy week happens, you should be able to reset the house instead of starting the organizing process all over again.
I understand how much one person can end up managing
I’m a mom, too, so I know how quickly the house can become one more thing you’re constantly carrying.
That’s one of the reasons I care so much about creating systems that don’t depend on one person remembering, finding, and putting everything back.
Because the point isn’t to spend your life organizing.
Ironically, I may love doing that.
You probably have other things you’d rather be doing.