5 Decluttering Lessons from Marie Kondo
Inspired by Netflix’s popular new show, “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo”, people across the country are battling the clutter in their homes. If your house is getting out of hand, these Marie Kondo-approved tips can help you declutter and become more organized.
Take ‘before’ photos. While you might be hesitant to take pictures of your cluttered room, it can help keep you motivated. Decluttering can be a tedious process, and you may not notice much of a difference right away. When you start to feel discouraged, you can take a look at your photos to see exactly how far you’ve come and how much you’ve actually accomplished. This can help provide inspiration when you start to feel overwhelmed.
Organize by category. When most people start decluttering their homes, they go room by room. According to Kondo, it’s more effective to tidy up by category. For instance, instead of sorting through one room’s inventory, you can just deal with magazines or books throughout your home. That way, they won’t keep popping up as you move from room to room. Kondo recommends starting with clothing first since it tends to be among the least emotionally loaded items in your home. This will also make you feel as though you’ve accomplished a lot right at the outset.
Determine value. Some things have obvious value that make them useful in our lives. On the other hand, we keep many of our possessions because they provide sentimental value or because we worry about waste. To keep items from piling up around your home, Kondo suggests you part with things that don’t bring you joy. Start by picking three items from a pile and compare each one. This type of comparison exercise can help you determine whether something offers value. If a possession isn’t useful in our daily lives, it should fill you with joy in order to justify its place in your home.
Don’t hang, fold. Once you identify the items you want to keep, you need to find a way to efficiently store them. Kondo has become famous for her unique folding methods, which maximize space. Instead of hanging clothes in closets, consider Kondo’s approach to folding clothes and storing them in dressers. It may take some practice, but once you master the KonMari method of folding, you will find that you can store clothing in tight spaces, so you will have more closet space for other items.
Organize sentimental items last. When you get started decluttering your home, you will soon discover that nostalgia is not your friend. It’s quite common for all of us to attach emotions and memories to even the smallest trinkets. This can make it hard for us to discard certain items, even if they serve no practical use. Kondo recommends putting on blinders when you’re decluttering. One good way to do this is by saving sentimental items for last. Avoid reading old letters or thumbing through photographs, since these are apt to kill your momentum by taking you down the proverbial rabbit hole.
Instead, pile any meaningful items together so you can sort through them later. After decluttering and eliminating all the non-necessities in your home, you will have more space to organize and showcase the beautiful sentimental items you want to keep. By saving these items for last, you will also be able to maintain momentum without getting distracted by emotions.
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