How can I declutter my home effectively? Discover the basics of Marie Kondo’s method for discarding.
Tidying completely deeply affects your mind. It inspires a strong aversion towards your previously cluttered state. The change needs to be so sudden that you experience a complete change of heart. This can never be achieved when you do it gradually.
Such a radical cleansing requires an efficient approach. The more time it takes, the more tired you feel, and the more likely you are to give up halfway through.
Know your purpose
In the words of Stephen R. Covey, you should always begin with the end in mind. The same is true for your decluttering marathon; what do you hope to gain through tidying? What would it be like to live in a clutter-free space?
Then, further explore your why‘s. If you want to declutter your environment to be less distracted, ask yourself why you want to be less distracted? If it is to work more efficiently, ask why you want to work more efficiently? Keep going until you feel like you have reached your core motive(s). This will help your keep at it when tidying gets though and tiring.
When you have assessed your underlying motivation(s) and visualised the result, you are ready to start discarding.
How to decide what to keep?
There are many ‘rules’ for deciding what to throw away, such as things you had not used in a year. These rules have in common that they focus on what we should throw away, rather than what we should keep.
This focus on what we will lose is a negative one and will make our decluttering journey a miserable one. Therefore, the best way to choose between keeping and throwing away is to take each item in your hand and see if it sparks joy. If it does, keep it. If not, dispose of it. Provided that you embarked on this journey to achieve happiness, this is the best yardstick to measure by.
Do not glance over items in a drawer. Take each of them in your hand—one by one—and see how they make you feel. Keep only those things that speak to your heart. Then take the plunge and discard all the rest.
One category at a time
As mentioned before, you should approach the discarding step one category at a time. Taking clothes as an example, go through the whole house, collect every bit of clothing, and spread it all out in one place on the floor. Then pick up each outfit and see if it sparks joy.
Gathering every item in one place lets you grasp of just how much you have. When this would be too much to oversee, you can sort in subcategories as well—socks, trousers, shirts… etc.
Dealing with one category within a single period speeds up the tidying process. Be sure to gather every item in the category you are working on. Do not let any slip by unnoticed!
The right order
Discarding items in one category is harder than in others. The more difficult categories often contain items with multiple types of value. Namely, these are things that
- you can still use (functional value),
- contain helpful information (informational value), and
- have sentimental ties (emotional value), and/or
- have a rarely aspect (e.g. the item is unique).
It is best to start easy and go increasingly difficult.
Keep it a secret
When you tidied up your place, make sure no one else sees what you are planning to throw away. Especially parents can find it stressful to see what their children discard. In the end, letting others in on your efforts can only make them, and so possibly you, feel bad.
In a similar light, do not make your close relatives the recipient of your discard pile. Do not transfer your problem to them. Find out what they like, and if you find something that fits those criteria, only then should you offer it.
Make tidying a meditative experience
Carefully considering which of your belongings sparks joy is an intense meditative experience. Make sure you are in a quiet and serene space. Noise will make it harder for you to access your introspective state, which will make it harder to feel the joy sparked by your belongings.
The best time to start is in the early morning, after flooding your ‘sorting space’ with fresh outside air.
What to do when you cannot throw something away
When discarding the things that we do not need, it is often our rational mind that causes trouble. When you come across something that is hard to discard, ask yourself why you have that item in the first place.
Posing this question carefully often leads us to realise that the item has already fulfilled its function. However, this function does not have to be its intended use. For example, a shirt of a particular kind of colour might have taught us that we do not feel this colour suits us well. The function, in this example, was teaching us something about the preference of the colour of our clothes.
This is similar for the people we meet in our lives, only a few can become a close friend or lover, but we might learn something from all of them.
When you come across something that you cannot part with, think carefully about its true purpose in your life. You will be surprised at how many of the things you possess have already fulfilled their role. By acknowledging their contribution and letting them go with gratitude, you can put the things you own, and your life, in order.
Discarding the things that have outlived their purpose allows you to cherish the things that you decide to keep.