Book Review: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

Curtis Perry
Sep 3, 2018 · 2 min read

This book has made “Kondo-ing” a verb thanks in part to an October 2014 New York Times article that popularized Marie Kondo’s method in North America. Her rules of cleanliness are deceptively simple: keep as much or little as what sparks joy in your life; discard the rest with a ruthless mindset. The point, as she says, is not to make tidying a cornerstone of your life, but to get clutter out of the way, physically — and, especially, mentally — to bring clarity to daily life.

Kondo is sometimes given to hyperbolic rhetoric, but in between her claims of tidiness inciting weight loss and supercharging career ambitions, there is some well considered advice rooted in simplicity and pragmatism: for example, keeping documents in three piles — needs attention, keep for now, keep forever. Micromanaging is a distraction. Keeping like objects together and storing objects vertically, rather than stacking them, are similarly concrete ideas worth considering. Sorting by order of easiest to hardest to discard, and from least essential and most plentiful (books, clothes) to most essential and least plentiful (papers, hardware, mementos) are similarly opinionated principles and at least serve as a good starting point.

Of course, not everyone is a convert to Kondo’s method. Kondo herself knows not everyone will take to it. Still, as many North Americans are reportedly resorting to a booming cold storage industry while others worship the perennially unattainable ideal of minimalism, there’s a fundamental sensibility here that drives the book, notwithstanding Kondo’s predilection for treating every object she owns as if it were animated and alive — something you’ll probably find either charming and relatable, or a bit eccentric but harmless.

Curtis Perry

Written by

English teacher, writer, composer, cyclist

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