This is my ev-e-ry-thing. I know I”m a little late to the game, as Kondo was named one of Time’s most influential people of 2015, but I have drank the kool-aid and am ALL in with her method, her process, and her book.
Is thinking about “tidying” as magical make me feel a little silly? Sure. But I cannot stand clutter so this book speaks to me. Full disclosure: I’m a pretty organized person, so I get excited in general about organizing, but I think anyone could find value in this book. And everyone I know WILL find value in it because I literally cannot shut up about it.
The crux of the method is this: you systematically go through everything in your entire house and decide whether or not the item “sparks joy.” If the answer is yes, you keep it. If the answer is no, you can it. You obviously should make some concessions, i.e., I don’t know if I would call my “birth certificate” joy sparking, but I am certainly going to keep it. But distinguishing between “do I get rid of this?” and “keeping this is actively deciding to keep this thing I am meh about” was a pretty powerful realization for me.
She also gets into greeting your home, and making sure your socks are comfortable, and um, I was a little less into that. But the way she frames possessions, and our connections to them, really helped me to understand my relationship with my things. Also, the order she gives for going through things (1. Clothes, 2. Books, 3. Paper, 4. Miscellaneous (so pretty much everything else) 5. Sentimental) is really helping me to weed out what I can part with.
So, if you are feeling stifled by your belongings, looking down the barrel of an upcoming move, or just really want to find a way to get a handle on your housekeeping processes, I cannot recommend this enough!
I can feel myself gearing up for another big clean out. I go with the William Morris (?) line about having nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or think to be beautiful and this sounds similar to me. I’ll remember it when I’m ready to dig in.