A Review of "Organize as You Go"

Visit Marie’s House of Order website (www.houseoforder.com) and you’ll find the most organized and user-friendly website I’ve ever seen. That’s to be expected, because Marie Ricks is The Real Thing, a professional organizer. I met her at a book signing, and as always, I learned so much from spending two hours sitting beside another author.

She’s outgoing, a wonderful trait for an author. She’d approach people by saying, “Hi, my name is Marie and I’ve written a book on how to be organized. And after you get organized, you’ll want to read Janet’s novel!” Obviously, Marie is more than an author. She is a wife, mother, teacher, radio talk show host, web designer, self-publisher, motivational speaker, organizer . . . and a wonderful person.

Some of us are born organized. I suspect Marie was. I know her aunt well, and she, also, is very organized. So was Marie’s grandmother. I think it runs in the family.

However, some of us are organizationally impaired. That would be me.

However, I think everyone struggles with organization at one time or another, and Marie has easy-to-implement systems for all of it: household organization, mission and travel, schoolwork, finances, paperwork, meals . . . you name it. At her website are some great free downloadable forms. For example, do YOU know where to find all of your favorite websites, usernames, and passwords? I do now, because Marie has a convenient print-out form you can download for free, and now I can find all of that information in one place.

Marie’s latest book, Organize As You go, Successful Skills for Busy Lifestyles, is based on the author’s simple premise that “It takes a lot of work to be organized, but it takes a lot more work to be disorganized!”

Chapter headings include: Organized Every Day, An Organized Home, Organization Challenges, Organization for Parents and Children, Organized for Big Events and Holidays, Organized for Traveling and Moving, and Organized for the Future. At the end of the book is a twenty-year plan. Wow! I’m not quite there yet (thank you very much, I’m still on chapter one) but it’s a marvelous idea to put your life goals in writing.

Of course organization affects all areas of your life; it’s not just about improving your efficiency at home and work. It affects the very fiber of personal, family, and spiritual life. That concept is at the heart of this book. We don’t organize just to establish a neat, orderly, low-stress life; organization will help us to find more joy and satisfaction in all aspects of life, too.

I can’t recommend Marie, her books and products and her website, or her personal influence, highly enough.

About the author (from the book's bio page): Marie has been sharing home organization skills for more than 20 years. In 1986, she began teaching an eight-week, sixteen-topic course at a local community center, which included classes on time management, food preparation, closet and cupboard organization, budgeting, teaching children to work, and shopping skills.

Marie’s classes have grown popular both in San Jose, California and Utah County, Utah, where she now lives. Marie continues to teach home organization classes and seminars at church, professional, and community gatherings. She also spends time coaching homemakers in their own homes and helping them to be more organized. Marie has seen a lot of dirty laundry, cluttered closets, and untidy paperwork, which is very exciting to her.

Marie is a presenter at Brigham Young University’s Education Week. Her House of Order Handbook addresses the many facets of home management plus offers numerous worksheets to make running a home easier for any homemaker. Another book, Project Organization, Quick and Easy to Organize Your Life, was published by Deseret book and is available in local bookstores. Marie writes columns for several venues, has had her own radio show, and appears as a featured guest on TV and radio.

She has a large library of home management materials, endorses high quality housecleaning products, and shares a weekly email newsletter for interested women. Sign up at www.houseoforder.com

Marie has been happily married to Jim Ricks for 37 years and together they are the parents of five sons. Tom is a Math Education professor at Louisiana State University, David is attending medical school at Ohio State University, Brian is a computer science doctoral candidate at Brigham Young University (and a new husband) and Tyler desires an animation degree at B.Y.U. Evan, their youngest son, passed away as a young child from leukemia.

Author Marie Ricks

Marie and her family live in Highland, Utah, where she and her husband grow a vegetable and fruit garden as their summer hobby and share creative indoor projects together on colder days.