“The true goal of tidying is to clear away clutter so you can live the life you want.”
Marie Kondo, Japanese home organising icon & creator of the KonMari Method®
The Basics of the KonMari Method®
“Does it spark joy? If it does, keep it, if it doesn’t, let it go.” This is the phrase from Marie’s book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, that caught the attention of the world and inspired millions to tidy up and evaluate how they fill the spaces in their homes. Marie Kondo created a simple and effective tidying up technique that embodies a philosophy centered around cultivating a lifestyle that encourages the right mindset for choosing a living environment that brings you joy.
As a subtle metaphor, ‘Does it spark joy?’ (also referred to as joy checking), addresses the loose ends in your life that often results in clutter or disorder at home: over owning, delayed decisions, forgotten and outgrown pursuits, to name a few. Filtering your declutter decisions through this lens of joy, reconnects you with your inner self, discovering what’s really important to you, and choosing to only live among items you truly cherish. This gives you the clarity you need to face those loose ends so that you can enjoy a home that’s free from disorder and clutter that drains your time, energy and happiness.
There are four principal pillars that makes this approach effective:
Efficiency - tidying by category (not by location), by gathering all items within a category to joy check, choosing what stays and leaves one category at a time, before moving on to the next category. This allows you to see the volume you own per category that could be dispersed over different rooms in the house, such as the number of note books or scissors. If you tidy room by room you’ll never see the volume of similar items you own.
Personal fulfillment - approaching decision making over your possessions through a filter by asking yourself if an item sparks joy. Along with its literal meaning, joy in this context is also a metaphor for acknowledging everything that adds meaning, fulfillment, support and enjoyment to your life. This helps you to reevaluate which items still deserve a place in your current and future envisioned life.
Gratitude - practicing gratitude when letting items go.
Respect - respect your time by storing items that lets you see, retrieve and return them easily; respect your space by assigning a place to every item you’re keeping; respect your possessions by storing items to keep them safe, intact and useful for longer.
The KonMari Method® in Action
These are the guidelines for steps to follow:
Committing yourself to tidying up. Choose a realistic timeframe of addressing the whole home so that it’s a one time ‘event’ over as short a time as possible.
Creating a vision for your ideal living environment.
Tidying by category and following the categories in an order of easiest to hardest. The categories move from personal items (clothes, then books, then papers) to shared items (komono or miscellaneous - which is everything else in the home like kitchen items, linen, hardware etc.), then lastly addressing what’s typically the hardest category, sentimental items. These are the items we’re most attached to because of the emotional ties we have with them. The clothing category is the easiest one to start with since we have the least attachment to clothes due to the rapidly changing nature of fashion, the daily physical contact with our clothes, the fact that clothes can be easily replaced (it’s not scarce or rare) and is easily mended if a small part breaks like a button or a hem. There’s usually sentimental items within each category (e.g. a wedding dress, baby clothes, a varsity cap) and these are set aside to be addressed during the sentimental category right at the end.
Asking yourself, “does it spark joy?”. One by one, you hold each item within a category in your hand and evaluate its purpose and role in your life and your home - we call this joy checking. The objective is not on choosing what to discard but rather on choosing what to keep. It’s a small shift in focus but with an incredibly positive impact. During this process, if an item sparks joy, you keep it, and if it doesn’t, you express gratitude for the item’s time or lesson in your life before letting it go. Initially it feels silly to thank an inanimate object. What you’re internally doing through this, is acknowledging to yourself, that the need for the item in your life, for whatever reason, has been completed, appreciated, and that there’s no need to hold onto guilt or blame for having held onto it past its time, or for letting it go now. By not bringing you joy, the item has helped to show you what you do love. Items that don’t spark joy are then placed into designated boxes: e.g. donate, sell, throw away or recycle.
Finish letting go first. It’s important to first complete the decluttering process within a sub-category, before making decisions about where to home the items that are being kept.
Mindful storing and organising. When one category is done, the items you’re keeping in that category are then treated respectfully through folding, displaying, storing and organising them mindfully, with everything you need visible and accessible. How this is done depends on your style. Some people decant contents of food into clear containers, others prefer to have less visual stimulation and prefer to contain food in baskets. Some find calmness in ordering items according to the colour spectrum, others are overwhelmed by the upkeep this will take and prefer to rather order items together using a different criteria that’s easier for them. The KonMari Method® suggests a few options but doesn’t prescribe that storage and organising must be done only in one certain way. The best way is always the way that works best for you.
The result of the method is to acquire awareness and the right mindset for lasting change that sets your living environment on a positive track.
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Who is Marie Kondo?
Marie Kondo is an icon in home organising. She’s the author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing - a New York Times Best Selling book about the method she created to help people declutter and organise their home. In the wake of its popularity, Netflix launched a reality series in 2019, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, following Marie as she visits various American homes and guides the home owners (and their kids) in decluttering and organising their spaces with the help of her method. In 2021 Netflix released Sparking Joy with Marie Kondo, her second reality series.
Marie’s other books include: Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up; The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up: A Magical Story; Joy at Work: Organizing your Professional Life (her 2nd New York Times bestseller); and her first children’s picture book, Kiki & Jax: The Life-Changing Magic of Friendship.
Contact me to schedule a free 30 minute call to explore your tidying event.