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

by Marie Kondō

This doesn’t mean that tidying your room will actually calm your troubled mind. While it may help you feel refreshed temporarily, the relief won’t last because you haven’t addressed the true cause of your anxiety.

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.

Although 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.

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

tidy by category, not by place.

tidying must begin with discarding

Effective tidying involves only two essential actions: discarding and deciding where to store things. Of the two, discarding must come first. This

once you have completed this dramatic cleanup, you will have no difficulty whatsoever in putting things back where they belong or in deciding where to keep new things.