Without knowing it at the time, I was working with clients who had ADHD since the earliest days of my organizing practice. They may not have known it either. No one mentioned the acronym. In calls and emails, I routinely heard about the desire for help due to varying degrees of overwhelm, piles, clutter, difficulty finding things, indecision, and the inability to make systems work. Moves and other

“What do you keep on your (kitchen) countertops?” If only I’d been keeping track of how many clients have asked me that question. Curiosity about where things live on exposed surfaces my own kitchen is routinely met with a little curve ball. Regardless of the item being asked about, my response is usually a “no.” Why? There are no actual countertops in my kitchen. “But where do y

It’s Relatable with Kari O’Driscoll (Episode 6)Talking with Debra Baida About Stuff (why we love it and whether we need as much of it as we think we do), is now live!!! “Debra Baida, the owner of Liberated Spaces, talks to Kari about what it’s like to help folks organize their clutter, explore the stories we tell about our things, and how we can be more intentional about creating ease

In advance of being interviewed for Kari O’Driscoll’s awesome new podcast, “It’s Relatable,” I reminisced back to when we met over 10 years ago. (Trust me, the episode of our conversation will be posted very very soon, and I’ll share it here!) I believe our first exchange occurred over a meal or after a general session in the grand ballroom of a hotel in Midtown Manhattan during the an

Thirty years ago on a mid-July evening, I made a life-altering move: I boarded an Amtrak train in Penn Station en route to California. Thus began my chapter as a San Franciscan. Fifteen years ago around the same time, I launched a business. What began as spark-inducing conversations a few months prior morphed into what has become my second somewhat unconventional career as a life organizer. (I was

Here’s something to think about: sponges are among the most essential household supplies that are destined for the landfill. They often come wrapped in or are made of plastic. They get really gnarly and stinky. They cannot be recycled or composted. For many years as an adult, I used the brand of sponge that was omnipresent in the household I grew up in. It was a yellow rectangle of soft foam