TIDINESS OF ROOM REFLECTIVE OF MIND SOFTWARE
TIDINESS OF ROOM REFLECTIVE OF MIND FREE

Choose something to keep, put it on the shelf. In the conventional room-to-room method, we do the discarding and arranging at the same time. Gather every single book in the house into one place before deciding which to keep.ĭo it in two distinct phases: discard, then arrange. In Marie’s method, you go through all your clothes first, then books, papers, mementos, and so on. This method makes for a clear space (for a while) but it focuses too much on what each room looks like at a glance, and too little on why we keep the items we do, and how it feels to own them.

Last time I went room to room, closet to closet, pulling everything out, purging things I could do without, and then putting them back neatly.

Before you’re done, every item you own will have been handled and examined. One chapter is entitled, “Tidy a little a day and you’ll be tidying forever.” Tidying should be dramatic and thorough, because it represents a dramatic change, not only in what you own, but how you relate to what you own. Kondo’s prescriptions contradict almost everything I did when I first purged my apartment.Īim for perfection, in one swoop - quit trying to do a little bit every day. Where you keep your things is important, but it’s less important than which things you keep, how you feel about them, and why you have kept them.Ī family member gave me the book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and I’ve begun the process. Our homes - and consequently, our lives - get messy because we have fearful and unhealthy relationships with our possessions. Marie says tidying up is something that should done in one single, thorough effort, and it should last a lifetime, because it’s as much a rearrangement your philosophy as of your home. When we’re children we’re told to tidy our rooms, which we know means “get everything off the floor and out of sight”, and we generally don’t develop the concept of “tidy” any more deeply than that. Her name is Marie Kondo, and she says our conventional notions of tidying set us up for relapse. Now she’s got a million-selling book and a three-month waiting list for her services. While I was going closet-to-closet, purging and re-stacking, a tiny Japanese woman was developing a science around the idea of “everything in its place”. I thought tidying was just a matter of making things look nicer. Unless you’re born organized, decluttering is a fight against gravity and entropy, and maybe some other inalienable laws of the cosmos.

I’ve been meaning to do it again for four years now, but it’s an enormous job, and the benefits seem to wear off too quickly.

TIDINESS OF ROOM REFLECTIVE OF MIND SOFTWARE

They give your day-to-day life a sense of perpetual unresolvedness, like you’re always in the middle of renovating or switching to new software at work. Every item sitting out is an unresolved issue, both in the real world and in the mind.

TIDINESS OF ROOM REFLECTIVE OF MIND FREE

It’s a completely different home-life experience, free of a certain kind of tension that you only notice when it’s gone. I have never forgotten the uncanny peace that comes from a home devoid of chaos. It never got back to a clothes-on-the-floor level of messy, but there are objects on the dining room table that are never used for dining, and books living on surfaces other than my bookshelves. When I wrote about my success, I gave it the ambitious title “ Everything in its Place, Finally and Forever.” Things eventually reverted to tolerable clutter. It took about a month to do - and about six months to undo. Once everything had a home, I could put everything away in five minutes, and wake up to a clear space and a clear mind. I discarded more than half of my possessions, with the idea of owning nothing that didn’t have its own hook, spot or shelf. For a brief time in 2011, I had a place for everything.

Tidiness of room reflective of mind