It's not a diagnosis, honest.

It's not a challenge, a syndrome, an illness or an excuse: Chronic disorganization is a description.

And because I often feel it describes me, I found my car keys, a note pad, a ballpoint pen that worked and the directions I was sure were lost on my desk, and I drove Tuesday to Arlington Heights, the site of this week's annual convention of the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization.

I found the speeches and seminars running exactly on time and some 90 attendees, nearly all women, neatly dressed and carrying three-ring binders containing perfectly arranged, crisp summaries of each event as well the overall purpose of the gathering.

It was hard to blend in.

NSGCD members are all also members of the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO), an educational association for those take-charge, hands-on consultants who go to homes and businesses and help clients impose order onto their chaotic lives.

NAPO was founded in 1985 to facilitate communication among the growing number of professional clutter killers. And by the early '90s, as the story goes, these organizers had identified a certain seemingly intractable subset of their client population they couldn't help.

"I heard our members saying, `Some people are just crazy, I can't do anything for them,'" said Judith Kolberg, an Atlanta-based organizer and writer. "But I was determined to find techniques that would work for them."

In 1992 Kolberg formalized the term "chronic disorganization" and founded the study group. Her subsequent book, "Conquering Chronic Disorganization," with its numerous appalling case studies, became the bible of the group, which now meets every year in the run-up to NAPO's national convention, which began Wednesday in Arlington Heights.

We're all a little scattered now and again, Kolberg told me in an interview just before lunch as I scrabbled in my bag for a tape recorder that I hoped had batteries in it. Most of us wish more of our papers were properly filed away and that we didn't have so many random piles of stuff in our lives.

But the chronically disorganized--the hard-core slobs--feel oppressed and undermined by their lack of order "on a daily basis," she said. "It pervades their lives. In addition to being clutterers, they're also poor decision-makers and bad time managers."

Kolberg said that as modern life has grown increasingly complex, up to 10 percent of the adult population may qualify as "CD," to use the lingo.

What are the qualifications? The study group maintains a 21-part "Are You Chronically Disorganized?" questionnaire on its Web site (for links, visit chicagotribune.com/notebook), but you don't get a score in the end. You get just the clue that if you've been disorganized for many years in a way that hurts your quality of life and personal relationships and that has resisted self-help efforts, "you could be chronically disorganized."

The get-tough, throw-it-out-now-you-miserable-packrat approach does not work on CD clients, Kolberg said. "They tend to have already been judged harshly by their family and friends," she said. "So they're sensitive about it and don't respond to the sorts of logical approaches professional organizers generally use."

And because of this immunity to quick fixes and can-do bromides, they also require a lot more follow-up care, Kolberg said.

There was not a lot of talk at the convention to portray those with CD as pitiable victims of a disease (not that I didn't try!), though in some cases it is a symptom of attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, brain injuries and dementia.

The theme of the convention, "The Brain--Our Final Frontier," was that organization is a learned skill and that neurological insights into the various ways people learn can help the professionals teach those who never quite learned it.

"In most ways, our clients tend to be very intelligent people," said study group president Terry Prince of the Sacramento area.

"We don't know exactly why, but we do know that CD people think differently," Prince said. "That's why we also like to say it's not a disability but a difference."

Hmm. That might play at home. The chronically disorganized are not lazy or weak. They are different.

Better write it down.