Products that help you get organized - or do they?

These popular TV programs help break down that notion, she explains. "People say, 'Look, I think that's even worse than my house.' And it's not so much that they're gloating, it's that they're saying, 'Wow, other people have this problem.' "

Some consumers contend that today's plastic gadgets and furniture with storage - available everywhere from Pottery Barn to Target, Home Depot to Pier 1 Imports - help push them to tackle their clutter. On a recent Sunday afternoon, New Yorkers armed with measuring tape and shopping carts descended on the Container Store in Manhattan.

"You come here, you buy cute things ... it gives you the motivation to go home and get organized," says Angela Landon, whose small studio apartment had grown too cluttered with paperwork for her taste. She got rid of a table she used to pile stuff on and replaced it with hip-looking shelving and boxes. "It feels much better and my apartment looks much cleaner," she says.

Not everyone is as confident about where to begin. A typical problem, say experts, is that people are overly ambitious about what they want to do, aiming to tackle an entire project at once, rather than trying to chip away slowly at the messy tables and closets that confront them.

Those who are truly perplexed often seek professional help, as Vincent Miles Taylor did. Mr. Taylor was one of the makeovers on the first season of the TV show "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." Another recent customer at the Container Store in Manhattan, he attributes his motivation for building wall units and buying colorful storage bins to what he learned from the "fab five" cast members on the show.

"They inspired me," he says, his shopping cart piled high with shoebox-size red, blue, and yellow plastic stowaway boxes for his kids' socks and underwear. A point that stayed with him about containers: They're meant to be useful, not for hiding unsorted stuff.

He and his wife find things much more quickly now, he says, thanks to the labels that adorn the dozens of containers "Queer Eye" left with them. "It really works," he says of using the boxes.

Retailers say the idea of using products to get organized isn't really new. "We don't really think of storage and organization as a trend," says Melissa Reiff, an executive at the Container Store, which opened in 1978. "It has been strong for us from the very, very beginning."

She argues that one of the reasons the topic is getting more attention recently is that people's lives are more chaotic. "People have to be reasonably organized to be able to accomplish what they want to."

They're more likely to be successful, she adds, if they have taken stock before they come into the store. "We say the first thing you've got to do is take inventory."

Ewer and Winston also advise people to assess what they need before they buy any items to help them organize.

"A specialty organizing product is just a tool," says Ewer, "and if you use it the way it's intended to be used ... at the end of the process of going through your stuff and setting some limits, it's a wonderful thing. The real problem is marketing it as the process itself."

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