Book Review / The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo

This guide to decluttering your home from Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes readers step-by-step through her revolutionary KonMari Method for simplifying, organizing, and storing.

Despite constant efforts to declutter your home, do papers still accumulate like snowdrifts and clothes pile up like a tangled mess of noodles?

Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes tidying to a whole new level, promising that if you properly simplify and organize your home once, you’ll never have to do it again. Most methods advocate a room-by-room or little-by-little approach, which doom you to pick away at your piles of stuff forever. The KonMari Method, with its revolutionary category-by-category system, leads to lasting results. In fact, none of Kondo’s clients have lapsed (and she still has a three-month waiting list).

With detailed guidance for determining which items in your house “spark joy” (and which don’t), this book featuring Tokyo’s newest lifestyle phenomenon will help you clear your clutter and enjoy the unique magic of a tidy home—and the calm, motivated mindset it can inspire.

Published:     14th October 2014
Publisher:  Ten Speed Press
Goodreads :  Click here
Series or Stand-Alone:  Stand Alone
Source:  Owned - Audio book

With the grand success of listening to The Witches on audio book, I decided to give it another go.  This time I decided to listen to something that I had not read before so I chose this one.  I wanted to listen to this while doing my housework and organising etc to see whether it would influence the way I tidy and organise and whether I could get inspiration from it as I work my way through my house.  This was an interesting read.  It was interesting more for what I found out about myself rather than actually following this as a step by step guide.  As this book works its way through your house advising you to do this, that and the other there were parts that I thought were a good idea and parts that I really didn't think would work in my home.  Through listening to this book, I found out that I am more of a organise bit my bit, stage by stage, type person rather than gather up all of a certain type of thing in the house and sort it out all at once.  It was something that I had not realised before but realised that this was true of most of the things that I do around the house.  I like to do things bit by bit, processing each thing as I go.  For example, if my living room needs sorting, organising etc I would start with a section and do that and then I would move onto the next thing rather than sorting the whole room at once.

Although there were parts that I decided not to do because I felt it would not work for me, I found this book to be very inspiring and found great hints and tips.  So I would say that if this particular way of tidying up (gathering up everything and organising it in one go) does not appeal to you, do give this book a go as you can get so much more out of it than just that.  OK, it does get a bit weird in places where she is, for example, thanking your socks for their good duty but I actually found that to be funny rather than annoying and had a giggle about it as it is not something I would do...