PDF Summary:The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo
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1-Page PDF Summary of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
Have too much stuff, and not sure how best to get rid of it? Marie Kondo is a world-renowned expert on tidying, and this book teaches you how to get past the most common barriers preventing you from decluttering. Go through the Konmari method once, and you may find your relationship with things to be changed permanently.
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Some clothes need to be hung, like suits and dresses, and these should be grouped by category.
Books
Take all your books off their shelves and out of any piles they’re already in. If you have a lot of books, you can break them down into these subcategories: general books you read for pleasure, practical books you use for reference, visual books like photography or art books, and magazines.
Don’t read any books as you sort through them to discard. This will cloud your judgement.
Many people have difficulty in this category, specifically with books they still intend to read, and books they think they’ll reread again. Keep only your hall-of-fame books.
- If you haven’t read it yet and you didn’t just buy it, you’re probably not going to read it, so you should discard it. If, once it’s gone, you forget about it, then you were right to discard. If you find yourself still wanting to read it, go buy another copy and actually read it this time.
- There are very few books we actually reread. This is where the hall of fame idea is helpful. If it goes in your hall of fame and sparks joy every time you read it, keep it. If you liked it but would probably never read it again, discard it.
Papers
The general rule is to discard all papers.
There are only 3 categories you should keep: 1) papers you need to deal with, 2) papers you need for a limited amount of time such as warranties, and 3) papers you need indefinitely such as marriage certificates and insurance policies.
Many people keep things like utility bills or credit card statements. These should be looked at upon receipt to make sure there aren’t any issues, put in the “need to deal with” category to pay the bills, and then discarded.
Many people also have difficulty discarding lecture notes, since they don’t want to lose this information. But we usually put into practice information we’ve learned that’s helpful to us--so if you’re not actively using the information in those papers, you probably don’t need it.
Have 1 place or container for each of the three keep categories, and don’t bother with any further storage. The goal is to discard enough papers that it isn’t a hassle to go through everything you have to find what you need.
Komono, or miscellany
This category contains: CDs/DVDs, skin and bath products, gifts, valuables like passports and credit cards, hobby items, electrical appliances and cords, household equipment and supplies, kitchen goods and utensils, and small items like knick knacks and spare change.
This category encompasses a lot of stuff, but it’s also the category that contributes the most to clutter. Don’t surround yourself with things that you don’t use and don’t bring you joy.
Go in order from personal items to communal items (the order above roughly goes in the right sequence).
Sentimental items
This category includes any item whose primary value is emotional: cards, letters, gifts, photos, objects from your childhood or your children’s younger years, etc.
Save this category for last, because it is the hardest to discard and store.
- Sentimental items are rare, which makes it difficult for us to let go of them, and they usually involve someone else, which can often make us feel guilty for discarding them.
- Going through the rest of the process first will help you hone your sense of joy and your ability to decide what to keep and what to discard, which will make this category easier to work through.
Two major areas of difficulty in this category are photos and gifts.
- For photos: remember that you don’t need a photo of every second from every vacation or event. Keep only the best handful of photos from every memory and discard the rest. Then put all your photos into albums so you can easily access them and view them when you want to.
- For gifts: gifts are intended to convey affection from the giver to the receiver. They do this when we receive them. You may feel guilty for getting rid of a gift that someone gave you, but 1) the gift has already served its purpose, and 2) the giver wanted to bring joy to your life, so they wouldn’t want you holding on to something that doesn’t bring you joy.
Keep the things that spark joy, but be wary of living too much in the past and not appreciating the present or making room for the future. You’ll always have important memories in your mind. If you wouldn’t remember it without the physical reminder, it probably wasn’t an event worth remembering.
The Lasting Mindset from Tidying
If you learn how to tidy correctly, you can transform your home and change how you live your everyday life and perceive of belongings.
But discarding things and organizing what’s left can help us improve more than just our space:
- Dialoguing with ourselves throughout this process hones our sense of intuition.
- Deciding what to keep or discard hones our ability to make decisions confidently.
- Keeping only objects that spark joy hones our ability to experience joy, and creates more joy in our lives.
- Completing this process can even bring us back to big-picture life things that are important to us.
This process will help you live a more content life--letting go is more important to achieve contentment than adding. The less you have, the more you can appreciate the things that surround you daily.
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PDF Summary Chapter 1: Tidying
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- Once you start dealing with your own excess, it’ll create a chain reaction and inspire others around you to do the same.
- Once your own spaces are tidy, you’ll probably tidy communal spaces without a second thought when necessary, and you won’t feel resentful towards others because you’ll know all your possessions are organized.
Lastly, many of us only find ourselves tidying as a form of procrastination. You have a big test tomorrow, but instead of studying, you clean your desk. Why? The brain wants to study and put things in order, but the clutter around you pulls focus. Once you take the test, you don’t feel the need to tidy anymore, no matter how messy your desk still is. This kind of tidying is only standing in for a psychological tidying that needs to take place.
Tidying is a habit, and habits reflect our mindset. We all have habits we want to change, but we can’t change habits without changing the way we think. Tidying requires technique, but the KonMari technique is a mindset, and only by having the proper mindset can you tidy to the greatest success.
Why Should I Tidy?
Marie Kondo believes tidying is magic because, if done right, it can...
PDF Summary Chapter 2: The Big-Picture Process
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- Sorting through the whole pile, picking up each item and deciding what to keep and what to discard.
- Organizing what you keep in the storage space available to you.
Ideally, you’d discard and organize a whole category, start to finish, in one sitting, and then do categories back to back as soon as possible.
But most of us have jobs and responsibilities that prevent us from tidying this way, so “in one go” really means powering through the process as much as you can in the time you have available to do it.
- Kondo advises that “all in one go” can still mean the process takes you up to 6 months total, tidying when you have the long stretches necessary to do so. But it’s only 6 months out of your whole life to get your space in order and make a change that will affect the rest of your life positively.
A lot of organization advice says that you can make tidying easier by doing a little bit at a time. But this doesn’t make it easier, it makes it harder, and it makes you more likely to rebound back into clutter.
- Doing it little by little makes us feel like we’re organizing, when in reality we’re just doing things halfway and unfinished.
- **If we tidy just a...
PDF Summary Chapter 3: Discarding
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Sometimes people discard things that have fallen out of fashion. This will help you stay on trend, but fashion is fickle, cyclical, and personal: it changes constantly, things come back into fashion, and everyone’s got their own individual style. If you use this to get rid of things, you can end up discarding things you like and still get use out of, creating regret down the line and losing your sense of identity.
Some tidying experts give very specific criteria for discarding things: “get rid of it if you haven’t used it for a year,” “if you’re unsure put it away and wait 6 months to see if you miss it,” “you should only have X number of sweaters for the perfect seasonal wardrobe.”
However, what works for someone else might not work for you. Similar to fashion, following rules that are too rigid or too specific might also cause you to get rid of things that you like based on someone else’s preferences.
Kondo tells of a time in her life when she was fed up with tidying. She kept getting rid of stuff according to other guidelines, but her room still felt messy and cluttered. A voice in her head spoke up: look more closely at what is there. This led Kondo to the...
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Learn more about our summaries →PDF Summary Chapter 4: Organizing
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- The average home isn’t large enough for it to be much of a hassle to organize things more simply. If it only takes you 10-20 seconds to walk from one end of your house to another, is that really too much time to walk somewhere to get something?
- Tidying is about putting things away, not taking things out. Storage should decrease the effort needed to put things away, not the effort needed to take them out.
How to Store Things
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...
PDF Summary Chapter 5: Clothing
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- If you’re having trouble, start with off-season clothes. Because you don’t need these in the immediate future, it’s much easier to be in tune with what sparks joy and what doesn’t. Ask yourself if you’d wear this item right now if the temperature suddenly changed. If the answer is yes, keep it. If the answer is no, or “well...” then put it in the discard/donate pile.
If your clothing doesn’t spark joy, don’t just turn it into loungewear. You should still wear things at home that spark joy, not castoffs that at best spark no feelings in you and at worst spark the same negative feelings that kept you from wearing them out of the house. Free up the space and get yourself some nice loungewear, made by companies that specialize in loungewear.
You may worry you won’t have enough clothes to wear if you only keep what sparks joy. But by keeping only what sparks joy, you’ll end up with exactly the amount of clothing you need, or you’ll know exactly what to buy to fill out your newly sparse wardrobe.
Organizing
(Shortform note: The book has a lot of suggestions for organizing clothes. Try to apply the large ideas, but if a specific recommendation is way too tiresome...
PDF Summary Chapter 6: Books
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If you haven’t read it yet, you’re probably not going to. Discard it. This will be the true test of how passionate you are about it.
- If you don’t think about it after you get rid of the book, then you didn’t really want to read it.
- If, after you discard the book, you want it so badly you’d be willing to run out and get a new copy, do so and actually read it this time.
Most of us are also not going to reread many books again. We might have a small number of favorites that we actually return to time after time, but we keep way more books we’ve already read than we’ll actually return to. Keep only your hall-of-fame books.
(Shortform note: Kondo’s gotten a lot of criticism from the book community. We’ll clear some misconceptions up.
- Remember, she’s only encouraging you to discard what no longer sparks joy. She’s not telling you to get rid of all your books. Instead, make sure all the books you keep spark joy for you.
- She’s not telling you to throw your books away. Donate them to your local library or second-hand store so someone else can enjoy them.
- The decision to discard or keep books--or anything else in your house--is ultimately up...
PDF Summary Chapter 7: Papers
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* You don’t need to feel guilty about getting rid of cards that someone sent you. Each card fulfills its purpose the moment it reaches you and you read it for the first time--you are reminded that someone was thinking of you. You probably won’t go through old cards just to remind yourself of that feeling.
Organizing
There are 3 categories of papers you might need to keep:
- Papers you’re currently using
- Papers you need for a limited period of time
- Papers that must be kept indefinitely
Papers you do decide to keep should be further categorized into two groups:
- Papers to save, such as birth and marriage certificates, current leases, vet papers, and insurance policies.
- Papers to deal with, such as letters that need responses, forms to be filled out, or newspapers you’re (actually!) going to read.
Put papers that you need to deal with in a special place that contains ONLY these papers. Kondo suggests using a vertical organizer and putting papers in it without separating them.
- Even Marie Kondo has never successfully and totally emptied her “needs attention” box, but that’s the goal. They should eventually be attended to,...
PDF Summary Chapter 8: Komono, or Miscellany
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- Electronic packaging
- Many people save boxes in this category thinking it will make the electronic more valuable if they want to sell it one day, and for some items, it might. But if you think of your home as storage space that costs money to maintain, do you think having the box for that electronic will recoup all the money you paid in the years you let it take up space?
- Exception: we mentioned that Apple boxes and similar quality boxes make great organizers, so you might save some of these to use as organizing tools.
- Cords
- If you don’t know what a cord is for, you probably don’t need it. Keep the cords you can immediately identify and discard the rest. A tangle of cords just makes it harder to find the one you need.
- Broken appliances.
- If it’s broken, discard it.
- If you’re worried about disposing of appliances responsibly, look into your local waste management company to see if they do special pick-ups or have a list of what items to recycle.
- If you don’t want the money you spent on it to go to waste, see if you have an active warranty on it, or look into getting it repaired. Otherwise, thank it for its service as you...
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PDF Summary Chapter 9: Sentimental Items
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- Photos
- A good rule of thumb regarding photos is to cherish who you are now.
- Leave photos for last when you do this category. Looking at old photos will pull us in all sorts of directions--remembering past versions of ourselves, dredging up old loves and old burns--and it’ll make harder for you to discern what sparks joy for you right now in the present.
- We keep photos to remind us of specific times or events. But we probably only need a handful of photos per time or event, not entire albums dedicated to one thing.
- Many of us have photos lying around, tucked into books, or loose in a box. Kondo notes that photographs seem to turn up in envelopes along with letters that accompanied them. Put these loose photos in one place whenever you find them.
- You might think your photo albums are safe from the KonMari method, but they aren’t. How do you sort photos? The same way we’ve sorted everything else: one by one, taking each one in our hands. Yes, including albums. Take all the photos out and then go through them one by one.
- You’ll find that a lot of photos you kept through the years end up being unexciting photos of scenery, or...
PDF Summary Chapter 10: The Psychological Benefits of Tidying
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- Keeping only objects that spark joy hones our ability to experience joy, and works to bring more joy to our lives.
- Completing this process can even bring us back to big-picture life things that are important to us.
- A client had been working in IT for years when she went through the KonMari process. Once she’d whittled her home down to items that sparked joy, she realized that all her books were about social welfare, specifically in regards to childcare. And this client used to be a volunteer babysitter long before she entered IT--she’d just forgotten about this passion over the course of daily life. After doing the KonMari method, she quit her job and started a childcare company.
Letting go is more important than adding. Yes, this rule applies to tidying, but it’s a good rule for life. Many of us add things to our lives constantly, but still don’t feel happier. If we’d focus instead on letting go of things--both tangible things, like possessions, as well as intangible things, like grudges, trauma, and fears--we’d all feel a deeper sense of happiness.
This is not to say that clients haven’t occasionally regretted getting rid of something--it definitely...