PDF Summary:The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo

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• Once you start dealing with your own excess, it’ll create a chain reaction and inspire others around you to do the same.
• Once your own spaces are tidy, you’ll probably tidy communal spaces without a second thought when necessary, and you won’t feel resentful towards others because you’ll know all your possessions are organized.

Lastly, many of us only find ourselves tidying as a form of procrastination. You have a big test tomorrow, but instead of studying, you clean your desk. Why? The brain wants to study and put things in order, but the clutter around you pulls focus. Once you take the test, you don’t feel the need to tidy anymore, no matter how messy your desk still is. This kind of tidying is only standing in for a psychological tidying that needs to take place.

Tidying is a habit, and habits reflect our mindset. We all have habits we want to change, but we can’t change habits without changing the way we think. Tidying requires technique, but the KonMari technique is a mindset, and only by having the proper mindset can you tidy to the greatest success.

Why Should I Tidy?

Marie Kondo believes tidying is magic because, if done right, it can...

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• Sorting through the whole pile, picking up each item and deciding what to keep and what to discard.
• Organizing what you keep in the storage space available to you.

Ideally, you’d discard and organize a whole category, start to finish, in one sitting, and then do categories back to back as soon as possible.

But most of us have jobs and responsibilities that prevent us from tidying this way, so “in one go” really means powering through the process as much as you can in the time you have available to do it.

• Kondo advises that “all in one go” can still mean the process takes you up to 6 months total, tidying when you have the long stretches necessary to do so. But it’s only 6 months out of your whole life to get your space in order and make a change that will affect the rest of your life positively.

A lot of organization advice says that you can make tidying easier by doing a little bit at a time. But this doesn’t make it easier, it makes it harder, and it makes you more likely to rebound back into clutter.

• Doing it little by little makes us feel like we’re organizing, when in reality we’re just doing things halfway and unfinished.
• **If we tidy just a...

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Sometimes people discard things that have fallen out of fashion. This will help you stay on trend, but fashion is fickle, cyclical, and personal: it changes constantly, things come back into fashion, and everyone’s got their own individual style. If you use this to get rid of things, you can end up discarding things you like and still get use out of, creating regret down the line and losing your sense of identity.

Some tidying experts give very specific criteria for discarding things: “get rid of it if you haven’t used it for a year,” “if you’re unsure put it away and wait 6 months to see if you miss it,” “you should only have X number of sweaters for the perfect seasonal wardrobe.”

However, what works for someone else might not work for you. Similar to fashion, following rules that are too rigid or too specific might also cause you to get rid of things that you like based on someone else’s preferences.

Kondo tells of a time in her life when she was fed up with tidying. She kept getting rid of stuff according to other guidelines, but her room still felt messy and cluttered. A voice in her head spoke up: look more closely at what is there. This led Kondo to the...

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• The average home isn’t large enough for it to be much of a hassle to organize things more simply. If it only takes you 10-20 seconds to walk from one end of your house to another, is that really too much time to walk somewhere to get something?
• Tidying is about putting things away, not taking things out. Storage should decrease the effort needed to put things away, not the effort needed to take them out.

How to Store Things

The more general you are in your sorting, the easier it will be to find what you need.

Since you’ve already discarded according to category, now all you have to do is store those things near each other. Don’t scatter storage throughout your house. Keeping categories together will be the simplest way of keeping track of what you have, accessing what you need where you need it, and not rebounding.

• For instance, many people keep their clothes in a bedroom closet, coats in a different closet, towels and sheets in a linen closet, kitchen towels under the sink--minor separate categories in different places. Then, they have to do mental work to remember where every one of those categories are. This is how we forget what we...

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• If you’re having trouble, start with off-season clothes. Because you don’t need these in the immediate future, it’s much easier to be in tune with what sparks joy and what doesn’t. Ask yourself if you’d wear this item right now if the temperature suddenly changed. If the answer is yes, keep it. If the answer is no, or “well...” then put it in the discard/donate pile.

If your clothing doesn’t spark joy, don’t just turn it into loungewear. You should still wear things at home that spark joy, not castoffs that at best spark no feelings in you and at worst spark the same negative feelings that kept you from wearing them out of the house. Free up the space and get yourself some nice loungewear, made by companies that specialize in loungewear.

You may worry you won’t have enough clothes to wear if you only keep what sparks joy. But by keeping only what sparks joy, you’ll end up with exactly the amount of clothing you need, or you’ll know exactly what to buy to fill out your newly sparse wardrobe.

Organizing

(Shortform note: The book has a lot of suggestions for organizing clothes. Try to apply the large ideas, but if a specific recommendation is way too tiresome...

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If you haven’t read it yet, you’re probably not going to. Discard it. This will be the true test of how passionate you are about it.

• If you don’t think about it after you get rid of the book, then you didn’t really want to read it.
• If, after you discard the book, you want it so badly you’d be willing to run out and get a new copy, do so and actually read it this time.

Most of us are also not going to reread many books again. We might have a small number of favorites that we actually return to time after time, but we keep way more books we’ve already read than we’ll actually return to. Keep only your hall-of-fame books.

(Shortform note: Kondo’s gotten a lot of criticism from the book community. We’ll clear some misconceptions up.

• Remember, she’s only encouraging you to discard what no longer sparks joy. She’s not telling you to get rid of all your books. Instead, make sure all the books you keep spark joy for you.
• She’s not telling you to throw your books away. Donate them to your local library or second-hand store so someone else can enjoy them.
• The decision to discard or keep books--or anything else in your house--is ultimately up...

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*   You don’t need to feel guilty about getting rid of cards that someone sent you. Each card fulfills its purpose the moment it reaches you and you read it for the first time--you are reminded that someone was thinking of you. You probably won’t go through old cards just to remind yourself of that feeling.

Organizing

There are 3 categories of papers you might need to keep:

• Papers you’re currently using
• Papers you need for a limited period of time
• Papers that must be kept indefinitely

Papers you do decide to keep should be further categorized into two groups:

• Papers to save, such as birth and marriage certificates, current leases, vet papers, and insurance policies.
• Papers to deal with, such as letters that need responses, forms to be filled out, or newspapers you’re (actually!) going to read.

Put papers that you need to deal with in a special place that contains ONLY these papers. Kondo suggests using a vertical organizer and putting papers in it without separating them.

• Even Marie Kondo has never successfully and totally emptied her “needs attention” box, but that’s the goal. They should eventually be attended to,...

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• Electronic packaging
  • Many people save boxes in this category thinking it will make the electronic more valuable if they want to sell it one day, and for some items, it might. But if you think of your home as storage space that costs money to maintain, do you think having the box for that electronic will recoup all the money you paid in the years you let it take up space?
  • Exception: we mentioned that Apple boxes and similar quality boxes make great organizers, so you might save some of these to use as organizing tools.
• Cords
  • If you don’t know what a cord is for, you probably don’t need it. Keep the cords you can immediately identify and discard the rest. A tangle of cords just makes it harder to find the one you need.
• Broken appliances.
  • If it’s broken, discard it.
  • If you’re worried about disposing of appliances responsibly, look into your local waste management company to see if they do special pick-ups or have a list of what items to recycle.
  • If you don’t want the money you spent on it to go to waste, see if you have an active warranty on it, or look into getting it repaired. Otherwise, thank it for its service as you...

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• Photos
  • A good rule of thumb regarding photos is to cherish who you are now.
  • Leave photos for last when you do this category. Looking at old photos will pull us in all sorts of directions--remembering past versions of ourselves, dredging up old loves and old burns--and it’ll make harder for you to discern what sparks joy for you right now in the present.
  • We keep photos to remind us of specific times or events. But we probably only need a handful of photos per time or event, not entire albums dedicated to one thing.
  • Many of us have photos lying around, tucked into books, or loose in a box. Kondo notes that photographs seem to turn up in envelopes along with letters that accompanied them. Put these loose photos in one place whenever you find them.
  • You might think your photo albums are safe from the KonMari method, but they aren’t. How do you sort photos? The same way we’ve sorted everything else: one by one, taking each one in our hands. Yes, including albums. Take all the photos out and then go through them one by one.
  • You’ll find that a lot of photos you kept through the years end up being unexciting photos of scenery, or...

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• Keeping only objects that spark joy hones our ability to experience joy, and works to bring more joy to our lives.
• Completing this process can even bring us back to big-picture life things that are important to us.
  • A client had been working in IT for years when she went through the KonMari process. Once she’d whittled her home down to items that sparked joy, she realized that all her books were about social welfare, specifically in regards to childcare. And this client used to be a volunteer babysitter long before she entered IT--she’d just forgotten about this passion over the course of daily life. After doing the KonMari method, she quit her job and started a childcare company.

Letting go is more important than adding. Yes, this rule applies to tidying, but it’s a good rule for life. Many of us add things to our lives constantly, but still don’t feel happier. If we’d focus instead on letting go of things--both tangible things, like possessions, as well as intangible things, like grudges, trauma, and fears--we’d all feel a deeper sense of happiness.

This is not to say that clients haven’t occasionally regretted getting rid of something--it definitely...