Who can’t remember their mother telling them to go clean their room? I still get a weekly phone call asking if I am still hiding my dirty laundry under my bed…

Well, after reading these statistics, I may have to admit my mother was right about keeping organized:

1. An enterprise employing 1,000 knowledge workers wastes $48,000 per week, or nearly $2.5M per year, due to an inability to locate and retrieve information - IDC
2. 400 - The number of hours per year the average employee spends searching for paper documents.
3. It costs about $25,000 to fill a four drawer filing cabinet and over $2,100 a year to maintain it
4. We wear 20 per cent of the clothes we own 80 per cent of the time. The rest hangs there, just in case.
5. 50 percent of homeowners rate the garage as the most disorganized place in the house and a place the entire family uses regularly.
6. No Sex Please, I’m organizing. IKEA did a survey of customers in which 31% reported they were more satisfied after clearing out their closets than they were after sex.
7. According to a study conducted by a Boston marketing firm, the average American burns 55 minutes a day - roughly 12 weeks a year - looking for things they know they own but can’t find.
8. Americans waste more than nine million hours each day looking for lost and misplaced articles.
9. The average executive wastes 150 hours each year looking for lost or misplaced documents.
10. Record keeping constitutes more than 90% of all office activity
11. 25% - The percentage of enterprise paper documents that are misplaced and will never be located.
12. Getting rid of clutter eliminates 40 per cent of housework in an average home. Eighty per cent of the clutter in most homes is a result disorganization, not lack of space.
13. The US Department of Energy reports that 25% of people with two-car garages don’t park any cars in there and that 32% parked only one.

Maybe Mother Knows Best After All