Notes from ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up’

Recommended to me by many people, Marie Kondo’s ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up’ is a beautiful read, and perhaps one of the most practical I’ve encountered this year to date. Subtitled ‘The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing’, the book is essentially a love letter to being tidy. It’s also chock-full of advice on how to attain a decluttered life.

Kondo explains that the reason that we less in messy homes runs deeper than we think:

When a room becomes cluttered, the cause is more than just physical. Visible mess helps distract us from the true source of the disorder. The act of cluttering is really an instinctive reflex that draws our attention away from the heart of an issue.

…and suggests making a major change, all at once, to break the cycle:

If you tidy up in one shot, rather than little by little, you can dramatically change your mind-set. A change so profound that it touches your emotions will irresistibly affect your way of thinking and your lifestyle habits.

So once you’re ready to get to work, what does that ‘work’ look like? It’s simple:

The work involved can be broadly divided into two kinds: deciding whether or not to dispose of something and deciding where to put it. If you can do these two things, you can achieve perfection.

Kondo warns against the siren-song of stuffing things in drawers. That’s just perpetuating the problem, she says:

Putting things away creates the illusion that the clutter problem has been solved. But sooner or later, all the storage units are full, the room once again overflows with things, and some new and “easy” storage method becomes necessary, creating a negative spiral. This is why tidying must start with discarding. We need to exercise self-control and resist storing our belongings until we have finished identifying what we really want and need to keep.

…she goes on:

In the middle of discarding, they start thinking about where to put things. As soon as they think, “I wonder if it will fit in this drawer,” the work of discarding comes to a halt. You can think about where to put things when you’ve finished getting rid of everything you don’t need.

Kondo speaks highly of folding the clothes you own (which, for most people, are the main cause of messiness), but she recommends to do it in a very specific way:

The first step is to visualize what the inside of your drawer will look like when you finish. The goal should be to organize the contents so that you can see where every item is at a glance, just as you can see the spines of the books on your bookshelves. The key is to store things standing up rather than laid flat. Some people mimic store displays, folding each piece of clothing into a large square and then arranging them one on top of the other in layers. This is great for temporary sales displays in stores, but not what we should be aiming for at home, where our relationship with these clothes is long term.

And after you’ve finished with clothes, what about papers? Well:

My basic principle for sorting papers is to throw them all away.

That sentence made me want to stand up and applause — but it’s easier said than done. What about those items with sentimental value? Kondo argues that many of those should still be thrown away, but to take care in the process of getting rid of it:

By handling each sentimental item and deciding what to discard, you process your past…It is not our memories but the person we have become because of those past experiences that we should treasure. This is the lesson these keepsakes teach us when we sort them. The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past.

There is a deeper meaning to the process of tidying, according to Kondo. It is not simply to make a space clean, it is about balance:

In essence, tidying ought to be the act of restoring balance among people, their possessions, and the house they live in. Conventional approaches to tidying, however, tend to focus solely on the relationship between people and their belongings and do not pay attention to their dwelling. I, however, am very conscious of the important role the house plays, because whenever I visit a client’s home I can feel how much it cherishes its inhabitants. It is always there, waiting for my clients to return and standing ready to shelter and protect them. No matter how exhausted they are after a long day’s work, it is there to refresh and heal them. When they don’t feel like working and wander around the house in their birthday suit, the home accepts them just as they are. You won’t find anyone more generous or welcoming than this. Tidying is our opportunity to express our appreciation to our home for all it does for us.

As the book ends, the author makes one last case for living a de-cluttered life, but leaves us with a caution:

Human beings can only truly cherish a limited number of things at one time. As I am both lazy and forgetful, I can’t take proper care of too many things. That is why I want to cherish properly the things I love, and that is why I have insisted on tidying for so much of my life. I believe, however, that it is best to tidy up quickly and get it over with. Why? Because tidying is not the purpose of life.

This is truth. It is good to de-clutter, but only to live more purposed lives in general. Words of wisdom I immediately took to heart.