Marie Kondo Storage: Tips for Each Item, Boxes...

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up" by Marie Kondo. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading.

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After you’ve gotten rid of stuff that doesn’t spark joy, how does Marie Kondo recommend organizing your storage in your home? Learn the top Konmari storage tips here, including how to use her famous boxes, vertical storage, and top things to avoid.

Marie Kondo Tidying, at a High Level

First, let’s review the Konmari method of cleaning and organization to get the right context.

For each category, gather all the items together in a giant pile, discard first, then organize what’s left.

Here’s the correct order of Konmari categories that makes things mentally easier:

Clothes
Books
Papers
Komono (miscellany)
Sentimental items

For each category, go through every single item like so:

Pick it up.
Ask yourself, does this item spark joy?
- If it does, keep it.
- If it doesn’t, thank it for everything it’s done for you. Then move it to the discard/donate pile.

After you’ve discarded items in a certain category, then you can move on to organizing what’s left in that category. When you organize, keep your storage as simple as possible: use what your home already has, as opposed to buying a lot of complicated storage solutions that ultimately end up cluttering your space more.

Marie Kondo Storage for Each Category

Ideally, you should be able to see everything you own at a glance and get whatever you need easily. Vertical storage is better than horizontal storage to accomplish this, like books upright on a bookshelf instead of stacked on top of each other–it’s much easier to see all your books and take a single book out when they’re organized vertically.

How to Store Things, Marie Kondo’s Way

The more general you are in your sorting, the easier it will be to find what you need.

Since you’ve already discarded according to category, now all you have to do is store those things near each other. Don’t scatter storage throughout your house. Keeping categories together will be the simplest way of keeping track of what you have, accessing what you need where you need it, and not rebounding.

For instance, many people keep their clothes in a bedroom closet, coats in a different closet, towels and sheets in a linen closet, kitchen towels under the sink–minor separate categories in different places. Then, they have to do mental work to remember where every one of those categories are. This is how we forget what we have–we spread it around our house.
Instead, organize everything by general type: cloth-like things together, paper-like things together, electrical-like things together. This takes a lot of the stress and mental work out of organizing. Ideally, you could keep your clothes, your coats, and maybe even your sheets and all your towels in a single closet–most likely your bedroom closet–for the easiest general organization. (Shortform note: Wouldn’t this also make putting laundry away much easier?)

The best storage should let you see exactly what you have at a glance, without too much effort. To that end, vertical storage is better than horizontal storage.

Piles can be endlessly added to–you can always stack more things on top of each other. Infinite storage is bad for organization, and great for clutter. Conversely, vertical storage runs out. You’ll know when you’ve accumulated too much stuff because you won’t have space for it.
But piling things also puts a lot of strain on the things at the bottom, and will cause them to deteriorate faster. Also, when things end up on the bottom of piles, that’s usually when we stop using them, either because they’re harder to get to, or because they don’t spark joy and we use them less frequently, so they ended up there.

Marie Kondo Storage: Tips for Each Item, Boxes…