Five Decluttering Lessons from Marie Kondo

Marie Kondo had already taken the world by storm with her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up when her Netflix series Tidying Up With Marie Kondo hit screens in 2019. The reason for her success, and mine as a consultant who uses her methods, is right in the name of that book title.

It’s life-changing.

That sounds dramatic, but the difference between your home, your mood and your habits before and after you’ve applied the Konmari Method™ will, in fact, change your life. Let’s take a look at some of the decluttering lessons you might learn if you were to embark on your own Konmari Method™.

1. Your stuff makes you feel a certain kind of way. Some folks are skeptical about the touchy-feely talk that comes up when embarking on a Konmari journey. Marie Kondo teaches that your items either spark joy--or they don’t. For most of us, that’s the first time we’ve ever considered that our stuff can make us feel a certain kind of way. Certainly, we know buying stuff can be fun and spark joy. But, that old sweatshirt from college? That makes me feel? Is this the definition of being materialistic?

No! Actually, it’s the definition of being human. You’re a feeling being, and your stuff is part of that equation. Imagine the difference you might feel when you grab your favorite novel of all time versus how you might feel grabbing an algebra book from the class you barely made it through. Can you imagine the difference in how you would feel? Now, imagine your shelves full of only college algebra-feeling books. On the contrary, imagine your shelves lined with your very favorite books that spark the feelings you felt the first time you read them every time you see them?

Another feeling that is very present in the Konmari journey is gratitude. Whether you’re deciding what to keep or what to discard, you’re practicing gratitude. It’s obvious that you’ll feel gratitude for items that spark joy. Your favorite coffee cup? You’ll be thinking of how grateful you are for that cherished cup on cozy Saturday mornings. That perfect purple handbag? You’ll feel gratitude that it is the perfect complement to your favorite fancy outfit. Likewise, when you’re deciding that something no longer fits in your life, you’re going to practice gratitude for all that thing has done for you in the past. For example, you might thank that old toaster you never use for getting you through your first young, broke years as an adult while simultaneously understanding that you don’t have a use for it anymore in your life since you’ve upgraded to a toaster oven. In this way, you’ll be practicing gratitude as you go through your items. You may thank those pre-pregnancy jeans for making you feel like a million bucks years ago while simultaneously understanding that it’s okay that your post-pregnancy body deserves some fantastic new jeans. As you go work through the Konmari Method™, you’ll again and again, be confronted by the way your stuff makes you feel. That’s a good thing! The end result is to be surrounded by things that spark joy.

2. It’s about what you’re keeping, not what you’re getting rid of. Often organization gurus focus on what to get rid of. Perhaps you’ve seen the challenges like 100 Items in 100 Days or 20 Bags in 20 Days. While those challenges have certainly been helpful to people, the Marie Kondo method is very different. With Konmari, we focus on what you want to keep, not what you want to get rid of. Your mission is to go through all of your items and find what sparks joy so you can keep it, display it, use it and continue loving it. In this way, you’ll end up full of happy decisions that end in joy-sparking results.

Related: The Biggest Misconceptions regarding the Konmari Method™

3. Category is key. When left to our own devices, we might choose to organize our homes one room at a time. That seems like a safe bet, doesn’t it? One problem with that method is that you miss out on a serious secret weapon: the power of the pile. When we work through the Konmari Method™, we will go through all of your items by individual category. In this way, you’ll go through all of your bags at once, not just the ones that happen to be in your closet, but also the ones lingering in your entry closet and laundry room. Likewise, we will pull out all of your clothes at once. We will gather them from the hamper, the closet, under the bed, the dresser, your car and wherever else they may be hiding. The impact of using this method is that you get to see the full amount of each item you have. That’s what we call the power of the pile. When you see just how much you have, you will be shocked! That emotion will allow you to go through your items and pick what sparks joy and discard what doesn’t, guilt-free. Another bonus is you’ll be able to see similar/like items when deciding what to keep. Going through things by category, rather than by room, also helps you when designing your newly organized and joy-sparking space. That’s because you will also store things by category which will, in turn, save you many brain-calories when searching for things. When you consider that the average American wastes 2.5 days of their lives looking for misplaced items, this method gives you an awesome advantage. In fact, the category secret weapon is one that will ultimately help you get rid of clutter.

4. Understanding clutter better will help you get rid of it. A study done in 2016 at Cornell University told us what we all might’ve guessed: clutter stresses us out. Another study from UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives and Families told us that the more stuff women feel they have at home, the higher their cortisol (stress hormone) levels are.

It’s clear clutter is a problem, but have you ever really thought about what the meaning of clutter is? We hear about it, we certainly recognize it with our own eyes. But, how do you define clutter? We cannot solve a clutter problem or a clutter habit without truly understanding it’s meaning, and Marie Kondo does that best. Clutter is simply stuff that has not been put away. Furthermore, clutter is created when we fail to return things to where they belong. When you work through the Konmari Method™, you will create a home for every item you own. That home will also ensure each item is easy for you to put away. When you put those two methods into action together, you will once and for all conquer the clutter monster.

5. Folding is better vertically. One of the biggest takeaways most folks have after completing the Konmari Method™ is that they just didn’t know what they didn’t know. One of the more mind-blowing lessons from Marie Kondo is the vertical fold. Kondo recommends the vertical fold for many reasons: to save space, to reduce wear and tear on your clothing and to require the handling of your items often so you can keep an eye out for stains, fraying or other culprits. The vertical fold also helps your clothes stay less wrinkled and allows you to see everything you have at once. That is in contrast to the horizontal fold in which you can only see the top items. When working through the Konmari Method™, you will discover a love for the vertical fold as each piece of clothing finds its own simple, smooth, perfectly-balanced rectangle shape. It’s a fun and functional skill to master.

Related: How to organize your clothes

Copyright © 2020 by Janine Morales, Professional Home and Business Organizer and Certified KonMari™ Consultant in San Diego and surrounding areas.