Life clutters easily with two working parents and a young child. We toss around the word "systems" a lot in our home. The hall closet is messy again, so we need a new "system". Towels aren't getting hung up properly, so we need a better "system". We need to plan a trip to IKEA to find a better home office storage "system". And our "systems" often work - for a month or two. We're a fairly tidy family. We regularly weed through unused items to sell or donate. We do what we can to declutter our home, yet we're stuck in a constant cycle of reorganizing and shuffling our belongings. This is why I didn't hesitate to read Marie Kondo's The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up after three different couples raved about how it's changed their lives to me within the same week.
I decided to try the latest minimalist home organization trend for myself. Marie Kondo is a bestselling author and home organization specialist from Tokyo, Japan. She's spent decades perfecting the KonMari Method, her own personal system for decluttering homes and spaces. There's a three-month waiting list for her services, and she boasts that clients who follow her method exactly never need her services again. What makes Kondo's method so different is that it is relentless in its process of weeding out clutter. The purpose of decluttering the home is to weed out all unused and unnecessary items until the only items left in one's home are those that "spark joy." It's meant to be a once in a lifetime purging process that will cure your family's clutter problems once and for all. Kondo claims the process can take up to six months to complete, but then clients never have to do it again. Kondo says the main home organization mistake people make is focusing on what items to get rid of or throw away. Her method emphasizes what to keep by asking the question, "Does this bring me joy?" If it doesn't, get rid of it.
But it's not always that easy. People have a hard time getting rid of things they can still use, items that hold information they might need one day, objects that hold emotional value, or things that are hard to obtain. Rational thought often makes it difficult for people to discard of items they no longer use that just sit in storage or clutter up space. Kondo recommends sticking to intuition and focusing on what currently brings you joy. Another mistake people make is organizing room by room. All this does is reshuffle clutter around and create a revolving door of decluttering room by room. Kondo suggests focusing on categories instead. She recommends purging items in the following order: clothes, books, papers, miscellany, and mementos. By focusing on a specific category, people declutter every item in that category from their home at once, rather than shuffle it to another room.
Our family made a commitment at our last family meeting: to declutter once and for all and only surround ourselves with items that bring us joy. We know it means sacrificing some of our time the next few weeks. It means making tough decisions and letting go of items that have meant something to us in the past, but we're ready for a more minimalist lifestyle. The first project we plan to tackle is our clothes. Kondo claims that "not every person you meet in life will become a close friend or lover." The same can be said of the items we keep in our home. We're ready to discard of past lovers and friends that once brought us joy or never brought us joy. You can follow us here on Parent Co. as we purge our way to joy each week and learn some decluttering tips along the way.
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