the life-changing magic of tidying up

moving every couple of years helps with this, since it's a pain to pack and unpack. so we just give a lot of stuff away each time. should just stop buying stuff I guess

if you are satisfied with your house situation i don't think this book is for you, lampy

i like theories about organization though

what do you like about it harbl?

i like how she is kind of extreme and doesn't bother to talk about why i procrastinate or you need to Always Be Cleaning crap that i have always had trouble with. just throw your life in the garbage.

What was th emost expensive thing you threw out

Wha t was the heaviest

it's not really a theory of organization, it's more just extreme anti-clutter. it's easy to be organized if you have like, no stuff.

i didn't throw out anything expensive or heavy yet. i don't own anything expensive!

I am much more inclined to straighten up, organize and declutter than I am to sweep, vacuum, dust or mop. So much more satisfying!

― Aimless, Sunday, February 22, 2015 1:22 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

same, great tidier, virtuoso throw of things into the garbage, terrible cleaner

i wish i could throw out my car

The secret to having a tidy dwelling is to keep all your shit at your parents :~}

i bought this house like a year and a half ago and still my second bedroom is the don't-want-to-unpack zone. slowly i have just been throwing everything in there away. it makes me feel so free. i only have 2 cardboard boxes left but also some plastic totes. i'm going to dump their contents. i haven't used any of the stuff in them.

i live to donate garbage bags of my crap

i recently threw 2 xl garbage bags of clothes in to a donation bin

right now i have a garbage bag full of dumb towels that were cluttering up my closet

and a bag full of books I will never read

:D

The best thing for me is her clothes folding and "vertical" drawer stacking - that continues to be awesome everywhere I apply it.

We still have 2 pallets of banker boxes, stacked 4 high, in the basement from our move to this house 5 years ago. Maybe by summer I'll be up to tackling them.

throw them in the river m8

Have to touch each thing, see if there's joy, then into the river

let the river touch joy --the life-changing magic of tidying up pt 2

i bought this as a pass agg birthday gift for my boyfriend in a fit of pique but after it came it just sat on the porch for a week because i was gone and so the post office sent it back. amazon gave me a refund and i didn't even have to do anything. very clutter-free.

Burn After Cleaning

i bought this book today

It is my intention to have far less things. Compared to most people I know, I am light on useless crap. Sometimes I buy small ceramic things and I have some feminist art I found at a bus stop and carried home once. I am willing to part with all the things that do not give me joy. I have many things that give me anxiety, like a vase with a weird crackly surface. When I see this vase I worry that it will get dirty and that I will have to clean it and that in cleaning it the surface will crack more and more. I should probably get rid of it. I think I could start a very well curated Etsy store for tasteful 1970s pottery.

My problem is more about clothes. I need much more clothes than the ones that give me joy for practical reasons. I work with special needs kids, I cycle everywhere, rain and shine. I have a whole pile of clothes that exist to get destroyed by the elements, I need a t-shirt to wear everyday in hot weather. Sometimes two. I don't want to ruin my "special spark of joy" trousers by wearing them when I cycle across town and then get vomited on by a four year old. I need a pair of jeans to wear when I paint the hallway or a t-shirt i don't mind getting splattered when I cook. the problem with so many decluttering minimalist manifestos that i see is that it doesn't keep in mind the fact that I sometimes don't have time to do a wash and I often have to do things that are dirty or messy. I always have to bear in mind that my parents are basically hoarders and I have to stop myself from keeping things that "might come in handy" all the time.

is everything supposed to have a "special spark of joy"? what is "joy" anyway? I have a box of lightbulbs, a flashlight, an off-brand leatherman, laundry detergent, and a tin where I keep quarters for laundry, in the weird built in shelf thing by my door. I feel satisfied that I have these things, and that they are in that place because it is strategic and convenient. Is that the same thing as "joy" ... idk

I have too much stuff and have clutter issues but I'm going to stick with "emotional resonance" or "physical need" when cleaning. My joy is internal, thanks

except for that mop I bought, the joy mop

my mop is pretty damn dope.

i haven't read the book (my mom has it), but does the author address the issue of items related to one's menstrual cycle?

i also realized that the majority of space in my apartment is taken up by things that are part of an "archive" or "library" ... where the thing is a part of a larger collection of things, so it isn't just about my relationship with each individual thing.

but for the most part (like 99%), everything I own is either art/knowledge-related or it is functional. I don't have a bunch of trinket-y things. I have very few things that are mementos or are kept for purely sentimental reasons.

i'm moving house tomorrow and christ alive do my partner and i own far too many books. she'd never let me get rid of them though

my wife read this book (or some of it at least) and said it's mostly about folding things and rolling clothes up into tubes and dumb shit like that

The clothes-into-tubes thing is cool - that way you can see all of your shirts in the drawer rather than just what's at the top of the stack...

Xp lol no it's not

It's a great book if you can see past some of "whimsical" wording - which is prob the result of translation - and the "spark of joy" in relation to practical items is explained pretty well; the point isn't getting rid of stuff, it's about deciding what's worth keeping and appreciating your shit and what your shit does for you. So the "joy" of tampons is supposed to be like "I appreciate these tampons bc they stop me leaking blood everywhere". So yeah it's corny af, but makes a lot of sense.

NB I read it a while ago and still haven't actually konmari'd any part of my house.

Xp lol no it's not

It's a great book if you can see past some of "whimsical" wording - which is prob the result of translation - and the "spark of joy" in relation to practical items is explained pretty well; the point isn't getting rid of stuff, it's about deciding what's worth keeping and appreciating your shit and what your shit does for you. So the "joy" of tampons is supposed to be like "I appreciate these tampons bc they stop me leaking blood everywhere". So yeah it's corny af, but makes a lot of sense.

NB I read it a while ago and still haven't actually konmari'd any part of my house.

Xp lol no it's not

It's a great book if you can see past some of "whimsical" wording - which is prob the result of translation - and the "spark of joy" in relation to practical items is explained pretty well; the point isn't getting rid of stuff, it's about deciding what's worth keeping and appreciating your shit and what your shit does for you. So the "joy" of tampons is supposed to be like "I appreciate these tampons bc they stop me leaking blood everywhere". So yeah it's corny af, but makes a lot of sense.

NB I read it a while ago and still haven't actually konmari'd any part of my house.

Fuck u, zing!!!

i think she has a section in the book about getting rid of duplicate items

I misplaced this book under a stack of magazines and some socks

my wife read this book (or some of it at least) and said it's mostly about folding things and rolling clothes up into tubes and dumb shit like that

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, July 6, 2016 5:41 PM (2 hours ago)

seems like she read (some of it at least)

i read this, and did it. i took a few months to really do it, and if you add up all the steps to the very end it took me about a year. i got rid of and replaced some furniture, which takes a while. and i just looked thru a box of personal childhood stuff only recently.

if you skip all of the stories of her clients going thru it and distill the steps of the process you could fit the real meat of the book on a notecard.

i'm really glad i did it. biggest impacts are probably on the wardrobe and the kitchen -- i didn't think i had much stuff, but of course i had a piles of clothes i didn't like and grubby old tools & utensils i didn't use.

i wasn't quite as ruthless as she insists when it came to my books, but i did offload about half of them (adios college) and got rid of no cds. honestly the step dealing with miscellaneous paperwork was probably the most painful.

the book is a funny read for its mix of whimsical touchyfeelyness -- "everything should bring you joy" -- and utter severity -- "keepsakes of the past are useless trash, if your family doesn't like you doing this, lie to them"

i wonder if 2nd-hand shops are seeing a weird glut, the book is enough of a phenomenon that it's inspiring some backlashy thinkpieces; "stop cluttershaming me!" etc

like, i just wanted to take stock of what i really owned in life and have an apartment that i enjoyed being in, not reach some shintoist level of immanence or w/e

of all the people I can think of, I would trust goole to be able to accomplish this

I think my coworker, who is kind of all over the place unless she's concentrating on a specific task, probably shocked her family by getting rid of everything in their house over a long weekend

distill the steps of the process you could fit the real meat of the book on a notecard.

please distill for us

throw out everything

i think that the backlash pieces are really dumb. she doesn't cluttershame - she's just really focussed on how you're probably hanging on to shit that is causing anxiety. if you actually like all your clutter and it makes you happy, she's not against that. but she gives you permission to throw out shit you're only holding onto out of guilt. and the idea is to get rid of all the bad shit so your life in your home is more enjoyable.

eg the paperwork thing - she talks about how we keep way too much unnecessary paper and with her system, once you've gotten rid of the excess, it promotes keeping that paper to a minimum, i.e. you keep all your important papers together, but they're so minimal that it's easy to find what you need when you need it but also each time you go to find something, you're forced to look through what you have and discard expired stuff (like warrantees etc)

eg gifts - she talks about how you don't have to hang onto gifts just bc they're gifts, you should look at the gift, appreciate the intent of the giver, and then if it's something that doesn't 'spark joy', you discard it.

even tho i haven't actually done this yet (i haven't had, and still don't have, the mental energy to do this yet), i've packed up my life and thrown away or given away 95% of my shit 3 x in my life, and never regretted anything i've gotten rid of.

i also really appreciate that she doesn't really care about types of storage or organization - sure, she recommends ways to store things better (the clothes rolling for example) but she doesn't have you meticulously organizing shit or buying special storage systems. all you need to do is find a place for everything and make sure things go back to their place every time they're removed. once you have a place for everything, the idea is that when a new item enters your home, you have decide whether it has a place or if you should discard it.

she's about a million times more reasonable on life advice than alain de botton

all pro kondo people otm

justine otm

once you have a place for everything, the idea is that when a new item enters your home, you have decide whether it has a place or if you should discard it.

I just started doing something like this with clothing. When I get a new thing that goes in the closet, I will remove an old thing that I don't wear. However, the old thing goes into one of the to-be-altered/refashioned bins under my sewing table ... it does bring me joy thinking how I could alter/refashion said item ... I am probably "doing it wrong"

lol on another site some dude was asking "how do I tell people I know that owning too much stuff is bad?!"

made me realize "too much stuff" is kind of a self-defeating phrase. how much is too much? how little is too little? what is clutter, really

clutter is the box of every TV Guide magazine from 1985 that I collected at the time because at the age of 10 I had the idea to write some insightful essay about the contents of TV Guide magazine, and this box has sat in my parents garage for almost 30 years. (Though I think they finally got rid of it in the past few months)

I would actually enjoy 'tidying up" peoples spaces. But I would be the opposite of Marie Kondo and probably traumatize people about all the decisions they made in their life.

Yerac, lol. "You paid ACTUAL money to see Limp Bizkit? In two thousand FOUR?"

I would make them tell me about the show first and their favorite lyric.

Otherwise you're just performing routine maintenance on your excessively consumeristic life.

what's wrong with routine maintenance?

― sarahell, Tuesday, January 22, 2019 7:56 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think the point was that it would be more lasting and sensible to reject an "excessively consumeristic life" than to merely maintain it in a way that makes it more tolerable.

― A is for (Aimless), Tuesday, January 22, 2019 8:07 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Right, it's this. So many times I feel like we have gotten rid of something we "don't use" only to replace it with something else we convince ourselves will serve the same purpose better, and then we don't use that either or it's equally lacking in longevity. Purging consumer goods can easily become an integral part of consumeristic habits instead of an antidote to them--an essential part of dealing with the inflow of stuff rather than a means to a more minimalist life.

ENDING IS BETTER THAN MENDING

https://static.adweek.com/adweek.com-prod/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/ikea-lamp-hed-2017-600x315.jpg

https://www.scifi-movies.com/images/contenu/data/0004210/affiche-brave-new-world-1980-1.jpg

I appreciate that someone wrote this article. I couldn't articulate a lot of this before . I think someone mentioned on the netflix thread about her shinto mindset.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/marie-kondo-white-western-audineces_us_5c47859be4b025aa26bde77c?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000046&utm_campaign=hp_fb_pages&ir=Entertainment&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=women_fb&fbclid=IwAR3N6HJMCDeFg9bYOTmG1howmeMOI5WV3KQnPpirnwCGJddHvlM07lpI9nQ

interesting, but it also seems absurd that that joking tweet about books required an apology

Oh, I didn't even see that. My tweet blocking powers are getting stronger and stronger.

also totally makes sense to me because the little once more religious Jewish voice in the back of my head said "that's idol worship" when I was watching it, lol

thx for that article Yerac

I think the point was that it would be more lasting and sensible to reject an "excessively consumeristic life" than to merely maintain it in a way that makes it more tolerable.

― A is for (Aimless), Tuesday, January 22, 2019 5:07 PM (yesterday)

this is kinda like my "waiting for the revolution" type anarchist friends that don't see the point of voting or getting involved in any form of activism that doesn't result in overthrowing capitalism, the patriarchy, etc.

lol what? It's nothing like that.

it kind of is because you are going to accumulate things and clutter and stuff you don't need because that is life in America, sorry.

or stuff you want for a while and then don't want -- consumerism is like gravity at this point -- sorry, this is just how I feel and also true

Buying behavior can just as much be altered as hording behavior. Of course no TV show is going to focus on not buying stuff though /trench

imo it's a trickle-down effect, by making you reconsider what you want to keep it makes you reconsider what you've been buying, and what you'll buy in the future

whether you buy it yourself, or receive it as gifts from well-meaning family members, like YMP's, you are gonna end up with a bunch of stuff you end up not wanting ... maybe not as much, but ...yeah, I challenge you to create an anti-clutter force field in yr home to prevent it from getting in.

Oh well for sure it can't be 100% stopped, I understand that well having a 3yo and a 7yo. We have a policy of throwing away all goodie bag junk after they go to sleep for example.

there’s kind of a Say’s law to clutter imo; having a tiny apartment helps. people with houses seem to love filling them up with random crap. my sister has an entire room in her house that’s just ‘storage’ (enormous piles of junk)

I have an anti-clutter forcefield. It was work though.

Plus it helps that my spouse was a techno hippie and he cleans his shit up like an adult.

having a tiny apartment helps. people with houses seem to love filling them up with random crap. my sister has an entire room in her house that’s just ‘storage’ (enormous piles of junk)

yeah!!! i remember when real estate ppl started selling the concept of the "bonus room" -- where the bonus room really was just a room to put piles of junk so the rest of the house could look fashionably tidy. otoh, I know plenty of people who live in small apartments that rent storage units.

Yeah was just talking about that with H -- we are a musician and artist and we always talk about wanting a house to have space for doing music and art. We just visited another musician/artist couple who had moved to a house with extra rooms, but they had managed to fill the extra rooms with crap and still not have space for music and art.

i just recently made more room in my apartment for music stuff -- such that, in theory, i could set up my drums in my living room -- which maybe i will do, however the downstairs neighbors would have an issue with me practicing them

Buy them earplugs

But them in little gift baskets with a note on scented paper saying you’re going to be drumming now

hahahah

everyone hates the drummer neighbour

having a tiny apartment helps. people with houses seem to love filling them up with random crap. my sister has an entire room in her house that’s just ‘storage’ (enormous piles of junk)

a reason why I am not allowed to live in a house with a basement ever again

Our last place had a garage and my husband was mad the new place didn’t - but guess what we never parked the damn car in there we just filled it with junk. Not having a garage means we def have accumulated way less junk in the last 5 yrs than we did in 2-3 yrs in the old place.

I do like doing the dishes tho, its a nice satisfying job that leaves the mind free

One of the big choices I make is whether to do the dishes every day or every other day. I need to judge how long it will take me then choose a musical selection of that duration. If I overshoot or undershoot timewise, I'm annoyed.

doing the dishes is a highlight of my day to be sure

I'm starting to enjoy a good hoovering as well

The importance of house cleaning has been growing for me over time, but it is also a source of stress and frustration because the other members of my household do not give it the same priority.