Learn More About Colleen Waterston

Founder of Space by Space Organizing and Sorting Through Life Podcast

Colleen Waterston is the founder of Space by Space Organizing, a Twin Cities-based home organizing business. She holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial-organizational psychology and a master’s in International Development Practice. Colleen blends psychology, cultural curiosity, and practical systems to help clients create homes that support better living. A lifelong traveler and student of people, she believes clear spaces free the mind and that organizing is a compassionate, creative way to help people “get out of their own way” and live their best lives.

For more on her professional endeavors, connect with Colleen on LinkedIn.

Family and early influences

Colleen grew up inside two powerful influences: a household centered around family entrepreneurship and a life shaped by questions about meaning and time. Her grandfather opened a funeral business in 1955; her father and uncle later built that into The Cremation Society of Minnesota. Her first jobs were answering phones at the Edina chapel one summer of middle school, and in high school, she laser engraved urns and other sentimental offerings. Watching a family business evolve alongside daily life, Colleen absorbed the daily discipline of entrepreneurship and the constant exposure to funerals instilled her with a Carpe Diem sensibility, knowing first hand that time is precious and life should be lived fully.

Education and career exploration

Curiosity and a restless desire to see how people live led Colleen to DePaul University, where she earned a BA in Industrial-Organizational Psychology with minors in Anthropology and Chinese Studies. Her academic interests reflect how she thinks about organizing today: people’s behavior and needs (psychology), and the cultures and contexts that shape them (anthropology). After college she pursued global development work, including a major farming project in Kenya, and earned a Master’s in Development Practice from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. These experiences taught her to enter unfamiliar environments thoughtfully, listen deeply, and design practical, scalable solutions.

After graduate school, she moved to Washington, D.C., where working with an advocacy group for the foreign affairs budget introduced her to the key players behind global policy and topics of conversations on international development.

Richard…

Mara…

These experiences ultimately inspired her to see more of the world for herself.

A project that changed everything

In 2014–15 Colleen set off on Big Shared World, a global “question-asking” journey, interviewing more than 700 people across 40 countries. She asked three simple questions:

What does a good life mean to you?

In your opinion, what is the biggest threat to humanity?

What will the world be like in 50 years?

The project widened her global perspective, expanded her empathy, sharpened her priorities in life to focus on connection, purpose, and the small everyday environments that let people live their values. Returning home, she began work on a book encapsulating highlights from the journey, but discovered that her best creative breaks were spent reorganizing her spaces. She couldn’t write well unless her environment supported focus, a practical realization that would later become central to her work.

From productive outlet to a new profession

Colleen’s path into professional organizing began with hands-on experience, both learning the products and the practices that go into a job well done. In 2020, she got a job at The Container Store in Edina, largely being placed at the register, delighting in conversations about what customers were going to tackle with their purchases. After maximizing her employee discount organizing spaces in her own home, she was eager to direct her attention to organizing the homes of others and apprenticed under an established home organizer. After learning what goes into the in-home client experience, she dreamt of launching her own organizing business to combine her love of systems, aesthetics, and person-centered problem solving. She found deep satisfaction in the human side of organizing: understanding how families function, listening for unspoken needs, and designing simple, sustainable solutions that respect people’s lives and values.

The launch of Space by Space

While at the registers of The Container Store, Colleen wrote a simple poem:

Little by little,

Space by space,

When it comes to organizing,

Give yourself grace.

This became the name and the heart behind her business.

Colleen founded Space by Space Organizing to bring a holistic, compassionate approach to organizing. Her background in psychology, anthropology, and international development gives her a unique lens: she treats clutter and disorganization not as moral failings, but as signals of unmet needs, competing values, and life transitions. She values her own experience and expertise in meeting people where they are, sizing up a situation with sensitive practicality, and offering a custom intervention to transform the homes, and lives, of her clients. Colleen and her team delight in helping clients reclaim time, calm, and agency, and ultimately to create optimal conditions for each person to live their own version of “a good life.”

Life beyond work

Colleen is a devoted aunt to two nieces and four nephews who call her “YaYa.” Nothing fills her cup more than driving to her sister’s house at the end of a long day, putting on an impromptu talent show performance with the kiddos. She founded a neighborhood book club that is a core part of her community. Colleen loves going to the dog park with her friends and adorably loving Australian Cobberdog Cora (fun fact: her first ever organizing client is a dog breeder who introduced her to Cora as well as Cora’s half sister Juno who makes life fun for Colleen’s mom and dad), fits in OrangeTheory workouts when she can, and clears her head by starting and finishing jigsaw puzzles, preferably without the box image as a guide.

Life beyond Minnesota

Travel has been a formative and relatively accessible way to see life from other perspectives thanks to her mom’s former job with Delta Airlines and her continued standby flight privileges. This benefit has also honed Colleen’s adaptability and spontaneous nature due to the flexibility required to fly with an unconfirmed seat. Countless friendships have been made on airplanes, in transit, and through experiences that can only be afforded from making the most of this incredible privilege of standby travel. Colleen has been welcomed into friends’ homes around the world, invited herself into many Airbnb private room travel bookings while traveling solo, and has seen countless ways people arrange their lives around the world. She brings that global curiosity into local homes, interpreting what “order” should look like for each client while maintaining the very embedded understanding that there are many ways to bring order into one's home, honor the unique values of one’s personality, and many dynamics of one’s life.

She writes about the adventures, as well as the quiet moments of life on her personal blog, Sorting Through Life with Colleen Waterston.

Above all, Colleen is driven by a wish to help people get out of their own way, make space for what matters most in life, and to simplify their systems so that they can live out their unique dreams and life’s ambitions.

3 Fun Facts about Colleen

She grew up with an abnormal obsession with the movie Beaches, a love for Bette Midler, and has seen her in concert five times.

She… travel.

She… lives in her childhood home.

What she brings to clients

Deep curiosity and active listening

Practical systems grounded in psychology and lived experience

A warm, nonjudgmental, empathetic approach to change

An entrepreneurial mindset that treats the business of home as a craft