The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (Magic Cleaning #1)

by Marie Kondō

Have you ever tidied madly, only to find that all too soon your home or workspace is cluttered again?

Start by discarding. Then organize your space, thoroughly, completely, in one go.

Putting their house in order positively affects all other aspects of their lives, including work and family.

A dramatic reorganization of the home causes correspondingly dramatic changes in lifestyle and perspective. It is life transforming.

when you put your house in order, you put your affairs and your past in order, too.

you can see quite clearly what you need in life and what you don’t, and what you should and shouldn’t do.

They are surrounded only by the things they love.

The cause is not lack of skills but rather lack of awareness and the inability to make tidying a regular habit.

Because a person’s awareness and perspective on his or her own lifestyle are far more important than any skill at sorting, storing, or whatever.

Order is dependent on the extremely personal values of what a person wants to live with.

In Japan, people believe that things like cleaning your room and keeping your bathroom spick-and-span bring good luck,

When you’ve finished putting your house in order, your life will change dramatically.

I’m sure most of us have been scolded for not tidying up our rooms, but how many of our parents consciously taught us how to tidy as part of our upbringing?

When it comes to tidying, we are all self-taught.

Food, clothing, and shelter are the most basic human needs, so you would think that where we live would be considered just as important as what we eat and what we wear.

Many of them have spent so many years applying erroneous conventional approaches that their homes overflow with unnecessary items and they struggle to keep clutter under control with ineffective storage methods.

“I clean up when I realize how untidy my place is, but once I’m done, it’s not long before it’s a mess again.”

is ikki ni, or “in one go.”)

If you put your house in order properly, you’ll be able to keep your room tidy, even if you are lazy or sloppy by nature.

People cannot change their habits without first changing their way of thinking.

clothes I never wore, textbooks from elementary school, toys I had not played with in years, my eraser and seal collection. I had forgotten that most of these things even existed.

My room seemed to have been transformed, and the air inside seemed so much fresher and brighter that even my mind felt clearer.

If you tidy up in one shot, rather than little by little, you can dramatically change your mind-set.

A change so profound that it touches your emotions will irresistibly affect your way of thinking and your lifestyle habits.

If you use the right method and concentrate your efforts on eliminating clutter thoroughly and completely within a short span of time, you’ll see instant results that will empower you to keep your space in order ever after.

If, like me, you are not the diligent, persevering type, then I recommend aiming for perfection just once.

Tidying in the end is just a physical act. The work involved can be broadly divided into two kinds: deciding whether or not to dispose of something and deciding where to put it. If you can do these two things, you can achieve perfection.

All you need to do is look at each item, one at a time, and decide whether or not to keep it and where to put it.

Many people get the urge to clean up when under pressure,

this urge doesn’t occur because they want to clean their room. It occurs because they need to put “something else” in order.

Their brain is actually clamoring to study, but when it notices the cluttered space, the focus switches t...

All thought of tidying is wiped from the person’s mind. Why? Because the problem faced—that is, the need to study for the exam—has been “tidied away.”

If you let the temporary relief achieved by tidying up your physical space deceive you, you will never recognize the need to clean up your psychological space.

Let’s imagine a cluttered room. It does not get messy all by itself. You, the person who lives in it, makes the mess.

When a room becomes cluttered, the cause is more than just physical. Visible mess helps distract us from the true source of the disorder. The act of cluttering is really an instinctive reflex that draws our attention away from the heart of an issue.

When your room is clean and uncluttered, you have no choice but to examine your inner state.

From the moment you start tidying, you will be compelled to reset your life. As a result, your life will start to change.

That’s why the task of putting your house in order should be done quickly. It allows you to confront the is...

The true goal should be to establish the lifestyle you want most once your hous...

I can honestly declare that storage methods do not solve the problem of how to get rid of clutter. In the end, they are only a superficial answer.

I thought that I had been tidying, in fact I had merely been wasting my time shoving stuff out of sight, concealing the things I didn’t need under a lid.

Putting things away creates the illusion that the clutter problem has been solved.

tidying must start with discarding. We need to exercise self-control and resist storing our belongings until we have finished identifying what we really want and need to keep.

Tidying up by location is a fatal mistake.

The root of the problem lies in the fact that people often store the same type of item in more than one place.

When we tidy each place separately, we fail to see that we’re repeating the same work in many locations and become locked into a vicious circle of tidying.

instead of deciding that today you’ll tidy a particular room, set goals like “clothe...

One reason so many of us never succeed at tidying is because we ...

This excess is caused by our ignorance of how much...

When we disperse storage of a particular item throughout the house and tidy one place at a time, we can never grasp the overall v...