The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

Summary

This book is telling you how to put your space in order in a way that will change your life forever. It’s not about ‘daily tidying’ but ‘special event tidying’ – a once in a lifetime task of cleaning your house. The KonMarie method teaches you the basic process of tidying which is to discard first then organize what is left. And to do it, you will use category system starting with (in order): clothes, books, papers, komono (miscellaneous), and sentimental items. For each category, you will go through: 

1. Gather all the items together in a giant pile, so you can see how many items you actually have
2. Ask yourself, does this item spark joy? If it does, then keep it. If it doesn’t then discard/donate it. 
3. Organize the items that you want to keep to a designated storage

Once you have completed all the tasks, you will never be messy again, you will feel lighter, more positive, and get a new start in life. 

Review

I bought the book because of the title, and never knew before that Marie Kondo is a famous Japanese cleaning consultant. To be honest, I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I thought I would. I will say the book is somewhat repetitive and it makes the same point over and over. However, she has a point that keeping your house tidy means you must change your mindset, and think critically about why you keep something around. Those items that you don’t even realize it’s there or seldom to use, why bother to be kept?

I have tried her method starting with miscellaneous category (because the items are not many) instead of clothes and asking myself “does this item spark joy?”, I manage to trash a couple bags and no guilty feeling at all, seems her method works with me. For those who have their own method of tidying, the KonMarie method can be an alternative approach to level up your way of organizing your house. You just need to choose, whichever method that works for you. By the end of the day, it is true that it is life-changing magic when everything has been tidied up. 

Book Rating 

3 from 5 stars 

Writer              : Marie Kondo

Publisher         : Ten Speed Press

Year                  : 2014

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Author: QiuQiu