Wherever I live my space is a mess. Even when I try to tidy up and organize things, it is mainly moving stuff from one place to another. That is not tidying up, is it. If you are like me, The Life-Changing magic of Tidying Up is a book that you should definitely consider. A messy physical environment also symbolizes that we have a lot unimportant, old things lying around in our conscious and that we need to declutter our head to make things right.
Marie Kondo is a Japanese cleaning consultant. With phenomenal success of this book in japan and world over, Marie has a 3-month long waiting list and cannot take on any new clients for now. In Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Kondo discusses the KonMari of organizing things.
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
Author: Marie Kondo (Author)
Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Ten Speed Press; 1st edition (October 14, 2014)
ISBN-10: 1607747308, 978-1607747307
Almost all books on organizing and decluttering tell you about the physical and psychological connection. Most will also tell you to donate the stuff that you don’t need. Marie Kondo does most of these things. What is different in her approach is that she puts life in the inanimate objects and the things you use and move and touch daily – and those you don’t.
The reader focus is shifted from benefits of decluttering to them to guilt of not giving enough time and attention to these inanimate objects lying around you. She asks her readers to feel each object and determine if it give them joy. If it doesn’t, the object perhaps doesn’t have any reason to be in your house.
She also goes to the root cause of the mess that you create in a place. One of the most important reasons why some of us are unorganized or messy is because there is no specific place to store things. She questions readers how they would feel if they do not have a fixed address to go to an be homeless looking for a place to lie down each night? By giving a definite place to each type of object, it becomes easy to categorize and park things in their right place.
The metaphor of connecting with your belonging may work for those of us who talk to their soft toys or have a name for their car. But I don’t see many taking up this approach (of talking to their socks and purses), though it might be a fascinating read.
On the other hand, even if we don’t talk to that box lying in the corner, it is true that the emotional connection with these inanimate objects is what keeps most of us from picking it up and throwing or giving it away.
So if scores of other, prescriptive and straight-froward books on organizing things and tidying up your space haven’t worked, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up might just tip you over to the other side, who knows.