The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying: A Simple, Effective Way to Banish Clutter Forever

Self-help book about how to declutter your home

I first heard about this author a couple of years ago after there was some controversy in the bookish world about applying her methods to books. I had meant to read her book for some time but, like tackling decluttering generally, there always seemed to be something else to do instead. When she landed her own Netflix TV series, again, I thought I should have a go at reading her book, but again, I didn’t get around to it. Then, she found herself in the middle of another controversy. As with the previous controversy, I felt that again people were not properly taking the time to understand the author or her method. During self-isolating, I had been doing a significant amount of decluttering anyway, so although I tend not to go for self-help books as a general rule, I decided to finally buy a copy of her book (an eBook, of course) and see for myself.

“The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying: A Simple, Effective Way to Banish Clutter Forever” by Marie Kondo and translated by Cathy Hirano (though, she is not credited in the eBook edition) is a self-help book about how to correctly declutter your home in a way that is effective, achievable and lasting. Through the KonMari method, Kondo explains that decluttering should happen in a particular order:

• clothing,
• books,
• papers,
• komono (miscellaneous things), and
• things of sentimental value.

Kondo also explains that we must first discard all our things that don’t spark joy – everything – before next contemplating where to store the things that we have kept.

This is an interesting (and, very happily, a brief) book with a very simple goal: to assist people to feel better about their lives by helping them tidy their homes. There were quite a few things in this book that really stuck with me. First was Kondo’s message that one of the biggest reasons that people struggle to keep things tidy is not that they are inherently lazy, but rather that they have never been taught to tidy properly. Kondo explains that tidying is a skill, and it is one that she has spent basically her own life fine-tuning. This really resonated with me, because there are so many things that people are expected to be able to do as adults like manage money and write job applications, but that we don’t receive any kind of formal training for. Thinking about tidying as a skill to develop rather than an action that you either do or not do was really helpful for me.

I don’t have a before image

but trust me, this is MUCH tidier

Another thing that I’ve found really helpful is Kondo’s insistence that belongings must be sorted by category and then stored by category. She encourages the reader to find all things of a particular type (e.g. clothing) from around the entire house, sort it all at once, then store it all in one place. She applies this principle to other things like cleaning products, coins, pens that certainly I tend to have scattered around the house with no one clear home. This has also been really useful for getting a realistic idea of exactly how much stuff you really have. I certainly don’t need a pack of ibuprofen and a cache of coins in every single room!

I do want to make a quick point on books. One of the things Kondo has been criticised most about is that she tells people to throw away all their books and suggests that we only keep 30 books in total. Of course, if you take the time to read her book (which I now have) Kondo never says either of these things. In fact, what she says about books is far more interesting. She asks the reader, “[d]o you feel joy when surrounded by piles of unread books that don’t touch your heart?” She then asks the reader to “[i]magine what it would be like to have a bookshelf filled only with books that you really love. Isn’t that image spellbinding? For someone who loves books, what greater happiness could there be?” She is certainly pragmatic enough to acknowledge that her book, too, is an object and encourages the reader to keep “only those books that will make you happy just to see them on your shelves, the ones you really love. That includes this book too. If you don’t feel joy when you hold it in your hand, I would rather you threw it away”.

I’m still on the clothing part (which includes scarves, hats, bags and jewellery), but books are next on my list. I already give a lot of books away to either the Lifeline Book Fair or my street library, but I collect a lot of books and receive a lot of review copies, and my to-read piles are numerous. If anything, hopefully at least by tidying up the rest of my stuff, I’ll have more space for books!

Now, I do want to mention a few things that I wasn’t completely sold on in this book. First of all, Kondo is quite a quirky person anyway, but a few of her ideas (such as drying her dishes outside in the sun and standing carrots upright in her fridge) I don’t intend to implement. I think thanking each object for the contribution it has made to your life is a nice idea, but is honestly a little too labour-intensive for me.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that although the first edition of this book was only published about 9 years ago, Kondo does have a bit of an essentialist view of gender with men and women each having particular traits (though I’ve even heard Margaret Atwood make comments about why men can’t find socks). However, Kondo does gently encourage women to aspire towards elegance and femininity, and her target audience in this book appears to be mothers and housewives. This is not to say that I don’t think that her method could be applied to anyone, but she does seem to view these tasks – organising and tidying – as women’s tasks. I will say that in her TV show, she very happily sets both men and women to decluttering spaces without any concern whatsoever for gender.

Finally, I do think that there is one thing that Kondo doesn’t turn her mind to in this book which is one of my biggest obstacles when it comes to decluttering: how you throw things away. Although in my city we now have green waste as well as recycle, although I have two types of compost bins, although you can drop quality clothing and items off at op shops, although some places accept plastic bags, fabric and even batteries for recycling, there are still a lot of items that simply cannot be donated and are likely going to just find their way to landfill if you throw them in the bin. Things like old teddy bears and out of date or damaged electronics have hung around the house simply because I feel guilty just throwing them in the bin. I think that while reducing the number of belongings you have is a great way to think more sustainably about your life, the act of reducing itself is important and I think that part of the reason why we accumulate so many things is because things are so disposable.

If you want to declutter your house and you’re not really sure where to start, this book is as good a place as any. Although not definitive, especially with regards to disposing things, this book has some unique ideas and helpful tips about how to tackle the task of tidying.