When any of my friends contemplate konmari, there is a hesitation. I mean, it sounds like a lot of work, right? And a bit crazy. I mean, start by throwing all your clothes on your bed? Besides, we have been burned by promises of decluttering solutions before. They want to know if konmari is worth all that.

Well, in my experience, I would scream “YES”. So you can stop reading right there if you just wanted the answer to the headline. However, if you are further intrigued, read on. Here’s why:

My konmari journey: By the numbers

I know the world loves numbers and percentages so I am going to estimate some that apply to my konmari experience. Konmari means concentrating on the treasures that stay, although early in everyone’s konmari, they tend to concentrate on the volume of discards, just because their environment is now airy and expansive in a way it was not before.

Clothes category:

Before konmari, I wore about 10 percent of what was in my wardrobe. I reduced my clothes by 75 percent and I easily wear 95 percent of what I have now. I may be spit-balling the math here, but isn’t that as if I quadruple-and-then-some’d my wardrobe?

Books category:

Faithfully following the method means taking all your books out and spending just a few seconds with each one. At first, this is hard because we all have those status symbol books we want to have on our shelves so others might think we are well-read. But after a breakthrough in the books category, I discarded probably 300 books and have kept about 30 books. Almost none of the keepers are those literary classics that Masterpiece Theatre loves so much. I even store those 30 volumes on a high shelf in my master closet. But I assure you that every time I look at that shelf of books, I just want to pull down each compelling title and read it right then and there. And looking at the titles tells me a lot about who I really am.

Papers category:

I discarded probably 95 percent of all my papers and am much more on top of the crucial 5 percent I really needed. There is a cost to keeping so much paper “just in case”. One example among many is that, in my pre-konmari snowdrifts of paper, I could never find my family’s eyeglass prescriptions, making ordering glasses online difficult. Instead, I would wind up buying our glasses from my eye doctor’s optical shop at a far greater price.

Komono/miscellaneous category:

Who knew that my clutter was keeping me from doing what I really liked to do? But as soon as I started working on my komono category in konmari and got rid of my ‘flotsam’ in the house, my most important activities became easy to recognize. And this made them even easier to do. Go figure. What I learned in my book konmari – that I will never read/do all the things that would be fun to read/do – applied to my kitchen and every other room in my house. I had just let all these hobbies accumulate without mindfully weighing whether or not I still wanted to do them. And all my craft-y pursuits? Turns out they were my way of hiding from my messy house. If I had to guess at how much I discarded … well, it would be hard. Maybe 70 percent? But I can tell you that my house is edging towards minimalism, I spend my time on activities truly important to me and I love it.

Sentimental category:

I could easily identify which photos and mementos were keepers. I dreaded this last category throughout my km and it turned out to be a piece of cake … because I followed the konmari method and did it LAST, when I was the most prepared and trained to do it. I probably unloaded about 85 percent of the pile, because it did not represent who I am now nor did it represent what was important for me to remember.

Konmari is worth it, folks.