Hi folks,
Today, I reveal the big winner from last week’s unofficial ‘TOA Organizing Awards’.
Good luck, reader.
Tim
For general mentality…
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
Kondo’s book demonstrates how a fuller life becomes possible when the self is freed of mental, visual, and physical clutter. But the problem with clutter is that we try to bring closure to something that will never cease – there is always something dirty to clean, something old to throw out, something else to put away. Her idea that storage is the last step in any tidying task is her lasting contribution to my overall organizing mentality. By saving all the storage-related aspects of tidying for the end, I became able to impose order on a process defined by its inherent disorder and bring temporary closure to a process that would otherwise go on forever.
Her main example came in the context of reducing possessions – do not store anything until all the items to throw away have been determined. I’ve found the idea applies broadly to other tidying tasks as well. In fact, it brings to mind many of the concepts I’ve highlighted before – batch tasks together for better efficiency, prioritize (and schedule) the mentally challenging tasks first, create spaces to store the things you’ve yet to make a decision about. All of these touch on this idea in some way by pushing the storage portion of a given tidying task to the back end of the process. And when the storage portion is complete, the task is over and you move on to the next thing.
Outside of this book being bizarrely marketed as ‘a Japanese philosophy’, I thought The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up was a perfect self-help book. Kondo kept things simple, didn’t bury me with examples or anecdotes, and, most importantly, didn’t make me feel like a butthead for being disorganized in the first place. It framed disorganization as a problem to work on instead of a nagging condition to forever manage. Most importantly, it acknowledged the importance of unlocking the soul from its incessant administrative expectations and freeing it to pursue the expressive, creative, and spontaneous activities that create new energy and make life worth living.
