The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing – Marie Kondo

If you have followed me then you must know I have decided to adopt minimalism in my life around 1-2 months back and this book played a key role in it. The first step to live a minimalistic life is to declutter things from your life and hence this book.

In this book, Marie Kondo shares the Japanese art of decluttering and organizing. She has even created her own KonMari method for this. Can you believe that someone can build a business around teaching people to clean up and actually be successful in it? I actually can’t. One of the testimonies regarding her services is that none of her clients has a rebound, which means once they have organized their life following her method, then they don’t go into the cycle of clutter again. I think this fact is the one that motivated me most to read this book since even though I like a clean space, it becomes very tiresome to keep cleaning it again and again.

When I am writing this review and when it will go live, I would have spend some time adopting this practice in real life. I will write another post after few months to tell how this method fared for me.

Key points from the book

• Don’t clean in parts, clean everything at once. If you will tidy a little everyday, you will keep tidying forever
• As opposed to general belief, she asks to go aim for perfection for the first time itself
• Don’t be fooled into buying innovative storage
• Sort by category, not by location.
• Clean things when the motivation is high
• Find the reason why you want to go through this process
• Don’t try to find place to keep your stuff. Start by discarding first
• Keep only those things which spark joy in your life. To find it, you must hold that stuff in your hand and ask yourself the question if it beings joy in your life
• Don’t try to enforce this declutter habit on someone else and if you feel like find what you have to declutter from your own space
• If you are finding difficult to get rid of something, ask why do get this stuff and what meaning did it have in your life? Ask whether it still adds the same value. Be thankful to that thing to have serve it purpose in your life and then let it go
• Follow the correct order while cleaning. Don’t start with sentimental items first. Start with clothing, then move to books, papers, miscellaneous and then sentimental items
• Find a place for every item and keep each item of similar type together
• Never pile things, store things vertically