If you are single, work hard, travel a lot and lead an active social life, you may have come to accept the not-so-great realities about modern daily life stresses and time management concerns. The consequence of a fast-paced urban lifestyle can often be seen with the constant daily struggle of balancing the do’s and don’ts of apartment living whilekeeping your home clean and organized even if you live in a small apartment or a luxury elite residence.
Inspired by the ultra-popular book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering written by Marie Kondo, we looked to Patty Morrissey, a Jedi from the KonMari Method of rationalizing her life, to get her take. Here’s what we learned.
1. Keep only what makes you happy
“Let’s start with your clothes,” Patty says. She makes batteries of each piece of clothing, winter coat, underwear, swimwear, work clothes, on the floor of my living room. Oh, my God. She calls it “the power of the battery” because it forces you to confront what you have. Kondo’s principle is as simple as can be; touch each garment. Feel it. Think about it. Ask yourself if it makes you happy. If so, keep it. If not, throw it away. Patty looks at an old fleece sweatshirt. “What do you think of that,” she asks herself. “I haven’t worn it in years, and it doesn’t make me happy. So, it has to go, so we throw it away.”
2. Value your belongings
Before throwing away the sweatshirt, Patty thanks it for the many years of service. It is one of the pillars of the Kondo method because it helps you to turn the page. “Thank you, sweatshirt, for keeping me warm when I was running to the gym,” It’s funny but strangely rewarding.
3. Never roll your socks into balls
Kondo considers socks rolled into balls as the devil’s work because they are “always in a state of tension, stretched, and their elasticity put to the test… what treatment could be worse than that? From a philosophical point of view, the goal is to respect what you have, which makes them live longer and gives you greater satisfaction.
4. Sort through what you have and your past
If you hold coffee cup in your hand that an ex-girlfriend gave you. Joy? You may have been carrying it around for years without ever using it, but never had the courage to throw it away. “Thank you for remembering the good times we had together,” you say to the cup, gently placing it in the trash. Kondo is against attaching himself to objects that hurt us. We need to focus on the present, not the past.
5. Take your time
“You wouldn’t hire a personal trainer to have a dream body in a few hours,” It takes time. Kondo says the process can take six months, but you may notice that even before you finish cleaning your entire home, you can feel the results.
6. Enjoy the least of your possessions
If one category is particularly hard for you such as books. You may be afraid of losing any paperback books, but you scrupulously sort through each novel and notice that there are some of them that you’ve never read. “If you haven’t read a particular book… this is your chance to get rid of it,” Kondo explains. Get rid of all those books you haven’t read. That’s what he did, and something unexpected happens you will like your shelves. They seem to glisten. The only books left are the ones you really like. Every time you look at them, you will want to take one out to read. Extrapolate this feeling to everything you have, and the result can be magical.
7. Focus on your values
If you like your walking shoes: joy. Backpack: joy. Passport: joy, joy and joy. Then you realize how much you love to travel. Let’s say that you are currently preparing for a mountain trek in Thailand. This is no coincidence. Changes like this are the reason Kondo says in his book that “many of his customers notice that they have lost weight or that they have tightened their stomachs. It’s a very strange phenomenon, but when we reduce our possessions and “detoxify” our home, it also creates a detoxifying effect on our body.
