The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
Marie Kondo, 2011
Why does the order from a big clean-up vanish within a week? The Japanese consultant Marie Kondo is sure the culprit is neither laziness nor a busy schedule, but the way we tidy. Her method is simple: sort through everything once, by category, and keep only what brings you joy. Inside are stories of her clients and storage rules that, by the author's account, make order keep itself.
Who it is for
For anyone who tidies up again and again only to watch the order slip away, and for anyone who wants to work out which things, and which life, they really need.
I never tidy my room. Why? Because it is already tidy.
The consultant no one comes back to
You probably know the feeling: you spend the whole weekend on a big clean-up, and a week later the chairs are buried in clothes again, a pile of papers is growing on the desk, and everything looks as if no one had sorted anything at all.
The Japanese consultant Marie Kondo is sure it doesn't have to be this way. She teaches people to tidy right in their own homes, one on one. Her waiting list stretched to three months. And yet, by her account, not a single client has ever come back to her. From a business point of view, that's a failure. Kondo sees it as proof that the method works: anyone who completes the course never lets their home fill with clutter again, so there's no reason to call her back.
She had been heading this way since childhood. From the age of five she read the homemaking magazines her mother subscribed to, and at school, while the other children played tag, she would slip away to sort out the classroom bookshelves. For years she got the same result: the order never lasted. She built her method, called KonMari after the first syllables of her family name and given name, out of those failures.
The book's main idea sounds bold. Clutter, in the author's view, is not a character trait or a lack of time but the result of tidying the wrong way. Sort through everything once, quickly, completely and in the right order, and the way you see your things changes, so you no longer feel pulled back to the old chaos. Six stories follow, among them an experiment with one item a day, a young woman in a room three by four metres, a voice Kondo heard as a teenager, and a friend who started her own business after tidying. Let's begin with why the familiar advice to tidy a little at a time doesn't work.
The one-item-a-day experiment
As a teenager, Kondo read some comforting advice in a book about tidying: don't aim for perfection, just throw out one item a day. It sounded sensible, since a year would add up to 365 items. In the morning she found a T-shirt in her wardrobe that she no longer wore and threw it out. The next evening a notebook that seemed too childish went into the bag. She decided to save a stack of sticky notes to throw out the following day. Then she forgot the rule for a day, then threw out two things at once. In under two weeks the experiment was over. And all that time she was buying more than she managed to throw away.
People usually link the word “rebound” to dieting: weight lost in a short time soon comes back, and it seems a quick tidy-up will go the same way. Kondo sees it differently. When you clear out everything you don't need in a short time, the space really changes. Rebound, as the author sees it, happens when the sorting is only half done but you believe it's finished. And if you tidy a little at a time, the tidying never ends: you see no result, your motivation melts away, and a month later everything is back where it was.
Her answer: tidy once, as a special event in your life, quickly and completely. For Kondo, “quickly” means about six months. The goal here is perfection, and it can be reached because things can be counted. The work comes down to just two actions: deciding whether to keep an item or throw it out, and deciding where to store what stays. Daily tidying, putting things back in their places, is still there, but it becomes a simple habit.
The order of these two actions matters. First you discard, and only then do you think about storage. As a young woman, Kondo bought shelves, dividers and boxes, yet her room still looked cluttered. When she went through the contents of all those organisers, it turned out she simply didn't need most of the things in them. Storage hides the excess from view, but it doesn't get rid of it. So the thought “will this fit in that drawer?” is best put aside in the middle of sorting: you can think about places once the excess is gone.
According to Kondo, you first need to see your home in perfect order just once: it's that experience that changes your habits.
About the author
Marie Kondo is a Japanese tidying consultant. She read magazines for homemakers from the age of five, and she gives private lessons in her method, called KonMari, in clients' homes and in company offices.
All books by this author: Marie Kondo
Terms from the book
- KonMari: The name of Marie Kondo's method and her nickname, made from the first syllables of her family name and her given name.
- rebound: The book's word for clutter coming back soon after a clean-up, by analogy with weight that comes back after a diet.
- tatami: A Japanese straw mat of a standard size. In Japan the area of a room is measured in tatami: the book's seven-tatami room is roughly three by four metres.
- aromatherapy: The use of scented oils and incense to relax and lift the mood.
- komono: The Japanese word Kondo uses for the miscellaneous category: small items, accessories, tools, kitchen and household supplies.
All terms
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