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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Marie Kondō
Effective tidying involves only two essential actions: discarding and deciding where to store things. Of the two, discarding must come first. This principle does not change. The rest depends on the level of tidiness you personally
tasks involved—discarding and deciding where to keep things. Just two, but discarding must come first. Be
camisoles to knitted sweaters. The average number of items in this initial pile is around 160. Confronted by their first obstacle in the tidying process, most people are
necessarily.…” If that’s how you feel, throw it in the discard or donate pile.
day and will find it a handy skill for the rest of your life. In fact, to go through life without knowing how to fold is a huge loss. The first step is to visualize what the inside
like these that need to be dealt with. Make sure that you keep all such papers in one spot only. Never let them spread to other parts of the house. I recommend using a vertical organizer in which papers can be stored standing up and designating a specific place for it. All papers requiring attention can be placed in here without separating them.
Infrequently used papers include insurance policies, guarantees, and leases. Unfortunately, these must be kept automatically regardless of the fact that they spark no particular joy in your heart. As you will almost never need to access papers in this category, you don’t have to put a lot of effort into storing them. I recommend putting them all into a single ordinary clear plastic folder without worrying about further categorization. The other subcategory consists
papers. Papers are organized into only three categories: needs attention, should be saved (contractual documents), and should be saved (others). The point is to keep all papers in one category in the same container or folder and to purposely refrain from subdividing them any further by content. In other
When you attend a seminar, do so with the resolve to part with every handout distributed. If you regret recycling it, take the same seminar again, and this time apply the learning. It’s paradoxical, but I believe that precisely because we hang on to such materials, we fail to put what we learn into practice.
Another thing to discard are all your credit card statements. What is their purpose? For most people, they are simply the means of checking how much money was spent on what during a particular month. So, once you’ve checked the content to confirm that it’s correct and have
Getting back to warranties: the filing method I recommend is to put them all in a single clear file, without separating them into categories. Warranties are only used once a year if at all. What point is there in carefully sorting and separating them when the odds that they will
it is the custom to send New Year’s cards to convey New Year’s greetings (many have lottery numbers at the bottom). This means that each card has fulfilled its purpose the moment the receiver finishes reading it. Once you’ve checked to see whether the numbers on your cards have won anything in the lottery,
Once you’ve checked the content, its usefulness is over.
have been that much richer if the space occupied by that box had been free when the person was alive. Besides, we shouldn’t still be sorting photos when we reach old age. If you, too, are leaving this task for when you grow old, don’t wait. Do it now. You will enjoy the photos far more when you are old if they are already in an album than if you have to move and sort through a heavy boxful of them.
highly unusual items and sheer numbers. I come across the first every time. It might be a music machine used by a singer or the latest cooking utensils owned by someone who loves to cook. Every day provides exciting encounters with the unknown. This is only natural,
to throw away, stop a moment and ask yourself, “Am I having trouble getting rid of this because of an attachment to the past or because of a fear for the future?” Ask this for every one of these items. As you do so, you’ll begin to see a pattern
an expression of the values that guide your life. The question of what you want to own is actually the question of how you want to live your life.
other of these thought patterns makes it hard to throw things away, we can’t see what we really need now, at this moment. We aren’t sure what would satisfy us or what we
mentally in superfluous things. The best way to find out what we really need is to get rid of what we don’t. Quests to faraway places or shopping sprees
All you have to do is eliminate what you don’t need by confronting each of your possessions properly.
dumping things indiscriminately. It is only when we face the things we own one by one and experience the emotions they evoke that we can truly appreciate our relationship with them.
three approaches we can take toward our possessions: face them now, face them sometime, or avoid them until the day we die. The choice is ours. But I personally believe it is far better to face them now. If we
something. The reason is very clear: discarding those things that don’t spark joy
because we have to search for something just to find out whether it’s even there, and many times, no matter how much we search, we cannot seem to find what we are looking for. When we have reduced the amount we
necessary information when we need it. Life becomes far easier once you know that things will still work out even if you are lacking something.
what really matters. Selecting and discarding one’s possessions is a continuous process of making decisions based on one’s own values. Discarding
