declutter

7 things that make clutter bloom

Photo credit: Daniel Chen

You know the house drill. It is Saturday morning and you are pumped up to get your home in order. All it takes is … well … let’s have you think on that while go back under your bedcovers …

7 things I THOUGHT a well-organized home required before konmari:

  1. More house rules. Think about the last time you had a boss who continually changed his or her expectations of your work. Yeah, that’s the one. Frustrating, right? In some ways, we home managers create those same frustrations at home with our family and housemates. We call it life training but in reality, we develop complex and ever-changing ways in which our family can help us maintain our homes.  “I work so hard at it so obviously this mess is because no one else does their chores around here …Wait! I have an idea! I will make yet another chore chart!”

  2. Less time with people, both within the house and going out. See also #4. You find yourself immersed in deep-cleaning a room so you decline an invitation out. “Hiking? Waterskiing? A museum? No, I couldn’t possibly go. I need to clean out my basement during my vacation.” This could turn into declining a cruise or a trip to Paris. Well, maybe not that … but enough of the smaller adventures that make up the bulk of living.

  3. A stringent weekly housekeeping schedule. You resolve to vacuum every Tuesday, clean out your fridge on Fridays, and so on. There will be NO evenings where you sit idle, because you are going to harvest every moment to whip your place into shape. I feel you. I had whiteboards filled with to-do lists that started off with the words “clean floors” and then “laundry”, like these are something that needed to take up calendar time and headspace. These weekly routines seem like a great idea, don’t they? The lists start like many of our New Year’s resolutions: sky-high aspirations which are dashed in Week #2 when real life intervenes. The schedule also hides the true culprit of the mess: clutter. How often did I vacuum or dust around piles and then wonder why my house does not look any better for my efforts?

  4. More time spent at home *pout* “Everyone gets to have fun except for me because I have to do such-and-such organizing …”. When your home is chronically disheveled with stuff, the job of keeping house means staying home to tend to it. So, like #2, you see people less and you describe yourself as a homebody. In truth, you are staying home to re-arrange your piles and to wonder why nothing improves.

  5. Doing the ‘dirty work’ all the time. You feel like every household chore is beneath you, yet needs to be done.  Even in a household of evenly-distributed chores, you are still trying to delegate your tasks to someone else, usually someone younger than you or someone who is your offspring. And when I say you, I mean me.  *sniffing* “Well, no one has clean underwear because my time is FAR MORE VALUABLE than to spend 4 minutes folding those. Just dig through the pile over there in front of the TV …” You simmer in resentment that the bathroom floor is only Swiffered by you, rather than realize the effort takes about 90 seconds to do. And if anyone (whose own chores are completed) dares to watch a movie or play video games while you work, that simmer of resentment turns into an unwarranted-yet-dramatic rolling boil.

  6. Expensive professional closet organizing systems “Oooooooh, organizing would be so easy if I had that galfa/Carolina-closet system in every bedroom.” If I could, I would make the word storage an unmentionable word. An ongoing myth is that there are enough storage solutions out there for any discontent you have with your home. We all know that, but we all perpetuate the myth anyway. When you hear yourself say “I need storage”, replace the word storage with the word imagination. Then dive into whatever home problem you see with a new perspective: that you can solve this by having fewer well-chosen things, not by getting more drawers, baskets, shelves, boxes and racks.

  7. Squirreling away the mess somewhere and hoping no one notices. Saying “Here, I will just buy five more Rubbermaid bins …” is your key indicator that you’ve become a human squirrel. Before konmari, my home was stacked with plastic bins, sometimes 5 to 7 bins high. Closets, the attic, the garage … they were just there to hold mystery bins of whatever-that-was. At its core, this squirreling practice meant large parts of my home were unusable. Not a tidy home like I was pretending to have, but a useless one filled with unseen stuff and junk.

How wrong I was.

None of these assumptions on a tidy home is true. I have no chore charts, no expensive storage solutions, no excessive boxes and bins. Also, I have no need to resent everyone else’s free time because now I have mine too. I have more time with people. I could easily spend less time in my home if I wanted.

My konmari removed all the clutter and gave places for everything that remains. That was most of the housework battle in a tidy home. For the rest — the vacuuming and wiping down and restocking — I take care of those when I notice the need. I don’t need to schedule a quick sweep of the porch … I just do it when I notice it needs to be done. Everything is completed quickly because all my cleaning tools are in their places.

It’s about mindful living …

6 life-simplifying phone changes

If my mobile was a person, she would be someone who delights in interrupting me … LOUDLY. INSISTENTLY.

My favorite konmari categories are the ones you can do while standing in line somewhere. You know … sort of a life declutter. I do these a lot and most of them involve cleaning out the contents of my cell phone.

This past week, I took stock of all the ways my phone did not spark my joy. I know that things are not people but Marie Kondo’s personification of objects in her best-selling “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” sometimes helps me make decisions.

If my mobile were a person, she would be someone who delights in interrupting me, both audibly and visually. LOUDLY. INSISTENTLY. All the time. Even when I am driving or having a conversation with someone face-to-face. Or the appetizer just arrived. Or the toddler just wants to keep playing peek-a-boo. Or.

Yes, I asked my phone-as-my-friend to remind me of things (and to keep reminding me of them) but here in the present moment, her enthusiasm for that task matched my insistence back then, a few days ago. Back then, I thought remembering that thing was the most important and vital thing that needed to get done. But … right now, I am BUSY doing something else on the phone. Or not on the phone. Couldn’t my phone-as-my-friend see that this present moment was more important?

So I changed my phone experience to spark more joy. These changes only take a few minutes and are the perfect way to feel productive while you wait for the next train, for the pharmacy to fill the RX or for that next bathroom stall to open up.

Here are the improvements I made to my iPhone, most of which are found in the Settings app:

1 – I took out all the pop-up banner notifications for all apps and texts. No more banners appear and block my view of what I am working on at that moment. (Check under Settings, then Notifications)

2 – I enlarged and boldfaced all the typefaces so that they are easy to read. (Settings, then Display & Brightness, then Text Size and Bold Text and View Zoomed)

3 – I took out all the custom ringtones and went with the “bamboo” sound and the vibrate function. I dialed down the volume too. Now my phone gives me a wiggle and a delicate sound to tell me something needs to be checked … when I have a moment. I do not need to know who is calling me or what is alerting me. I just need to know that I need to check my phone later. In a few minutes, I will know the whos&whats&wheres and reply when my attention is singularly focused. (Settings, then Sounds & Haptics)

4 – I FINALLY set the notifications to stop whenever I am driving. This was long overdue. (Settings, then Do Not Disturb – scroll to the end of the options)

5 – I selected the setting that turns the screen amber at sunset and back to blue at sunrise so that my digital life is more sleep-friendly. (Settings, then Display & Brightness, then Nightshift)

6 – I set a consistent bedtime and wakeup alarm schedules, one for weekdays and one for weekends. (Clock, then Bedtime)

My phone now works for me instead of the other way around.

My konmari by the numbers

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.

4 sample vision statements to kick off your minimalism

People skip their vision statements in konmari all the time. It’s easy to do … In her “Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up”, Marie Kondo spends very few words on this part of konmari. And she is intentionally vague about what a vision statement is.

In her manga book, Marie highlights the vision statement much more clearly. The manga-Marie-Kondo tells the sloppy protagonist to think about her dream space, to develop her WHY for tidying, as her first assignment. The protagonist sputters and asks to take action while the manga Marie assures her that this step is the most important first one to take.

That is really all a vision statement is, at its core: it is your why for taking on simpler living.

Having a compelling vision statement is absolutely the difference between finishing konmari and stalling out.

So how do we get to your why? Let me offer you a few approaches.

#1 Just pictures.

First, if my client is a visual person and is active on Pinterest, I encourage her to let loose on Pinterest with dream spaces. Drawn to Scottish castles? Sure. Love those opulent chandeliers? Pin ’em. Cat canals throughout the apartment? Why not. What emerges is, of course, their decor preferences and their dream activities to carry out in their current space.

#2 A few words. Like, maybe just three or four words.

My most successful konmari client began her konmari with her usual brand of personal decisiveness and direction. I watched in amazement as she developed her vision statement in a few minutes, using three words: “an open-house-ready home”.

She had just moved into a rental house with her family after their previous home sold. It sold quickly and her realtor attributed that to the home’s clean condition, a condition she told me was a rarity for her family. For a glorious month, she recalled, her family lived in a home stripped of all their clutter. They could be ready for a potential buyer in 15 minutes of putting-away and polishing. My friend said those four weeks showed them a glorious way to live and that her family loved it. When it came time to unpack the boxes at their rental, her kids were reluctant. They liked the space and didn’t remember what stuff had been packed away enough to miss any of it.

She craved that lifestyle again. “An open-house-ready home” became her mantra. As she discarded much of her clothes, books, papers, and kitchenware in those early coaching sessions, she repeatedly asked herself if the item she held in her hands brought her closer to that kind of home.

# 3 Reframe your most frustrating house moment.

My own vision statement was less of a picture or a few words and more of a feeling. I wanted inner peacefulness. I replayed my peak moment of frustration with my home (repeated each week): the moment when I would come in all hot and sweaty from mowing my lawn and realize what an absolute mess my home was. Then I reframed it. I envisioned that I would come in, sit at my empty kitchen table, and sip a glass of ice water. As I scanned my surroundings, I would not see a single task that needed to be done. Empty counters, no dirty dishes or laundry, no pantry or fridge or cabinets or closets needing organizing, nothing in need of repair. Nothing. I would be done with housework that day. It seemed impossible at the time but now that is standard operating procedure. When it comes to housework, I have very little to do on a daily basis.

Since then, I developed mini-vision statements as I went for each category, all of them based on my desire for that feeling of peacefulness. That helped keep me motivated. Fueled by my vision of peace, I finished my first round of konmari in four weeks.

# 4 Tell your house story.

Unleash all your complaints about your home while you take notes. This is often the first thing I do with new clients. They tick off their frustrations while giving the house tour and I scribble rapidly. Then I write a sample vision statement in story form. It is important to note this: I always, always, always get it wrong. Why? Because a vision statement is deeply felt and deeply personal. But my erroneous first attempt at their vision statement usually gets them started.

Here is one such vision statement story for a client, a recent empty-nester whose frustration is so high that her only house wish is to get to her next home. (Marie Kondo would tell her that preparing this home and becoming satisfied with it will bring her next home more quickly. Hard words to hear for someone who just wants to light a match and leave.)

Corey’s Vision Statement (Take Two)

It’s Friday afternoon. Corey pulls into the driveway, noting that their realtor’s car is out front so she waits until the realtor and the potential buyer come out. Corey feels no fear about the condition of her house. It is always “open house ready” without much effort from her or her husband Charles.

The realtor gives her a thumbs-up sign while the buyer is not looking and the two drive away. Corey pulls into the garage, which used to be an Olympic obstacle course even with one car gone. It has become a place of order and efficiency. Charles’ and Corey’s tools are attractively displayed and accessible. It should come as no surprise that they finished most of their home improvement projects within a year after she completed her konmari.

Corey enters the orderly, productive laundry room. No clothes are on the floor. Hangers on the rod are empty. She notes that hers and Charles’ laundry basket of “to be washed” clothes has reached the half-load mark so she puts down her (tidy) purse on the top of the dryer and pops dirty clothes into the washer. When the house is almost on auto-pilot, tasks like this seem invisible.

Corey goes down to the basement to check for workout clothes and towels to add to her half-load of wash. The basement now serves as Charles’ extensive workshop, which is part of the reason the garage has such a spacious feel. His car project supplies stayed in the garage and every one of his home projects moved down here. The set-up of this workspace meant he made rapid progress on home improvements and, as a result, there are few projects left to do. Corey surveys everything with satisfaction … this arrangement has meant the exercise stuff is used more too. Corey takes the workout towels and clothes from a cool and funky clothes hamper. After some trial-and-error during her konmari, Corey mindfully chose to place this hamper by the basement door. Since it is convenient, the hamper is now getting used just as she wanted it to be.

When Corey ascends the stairs, she scans the first floor, seeing it as her realtor and the potential buyer must have seen it. Every floor, counter, and surface in the kitchen and living room is clear. The kitchen counters are ready for dinner prep. With no tasks to impede her progress to her bedroom, Corey strolls through.

Corey looks up the stairs for just a moment. The second story is a place Corey goes often. The sunniest room is now her studio and her art supplies are arranged in pleasing and off-beat ways. She has plenty of workspace and she can retreat there and lose track of time on weekends … or she can just as easily spend 10 minutes before leaving for work on a weekday morning, just moving forward on the next step in whatever current art project delights her. The other two bedrooms are guest rooms for when the kids and their friends visit for a night. The floors are hardwood and the new baseboards look fabulous. The closets in both guest rooms are empty, as she made sure her grown children took all their possessions with them to their current apartments. The upstairs bathroom is no longer full of the kids’ half-used and abandoned personal care products; it is a spa-like set-up with folded towels, favorite soaps and a few toiletries for guests.

She moves into her bedroom. Ah, her bedroom is such a sanctuary now. The bed is made with her favorite sheets, pillows, and comforter. Her nightstand is bare except for a favorite lamp and the novel she is reading. Everything in the room points to rest and sleep. The bookshelves display art. No laundry or home project materials are in this room. The lighting is soft. The room breathes calm and serenity for both her and Charles.

Corey unpacks her purse at her bag station. She changes into comfortable clothes that play to her strengths. She could leave the house for a restaurant meal in what she is wearing if Charles suggested that. Otherwise, she has a bowl of chicken salad for the two of them to finish up for dinner at home, if they decide to stay in.

She gets a text from the realtor saying the potential buyer loved their home, finding every part of it to be spacious and clean. The buyer wants to return next week with her spouse for a second, more serious tour. A year ago, this second tour would have caused a flurry of household chores, packing up stuff and hiding it away. But now, none of this is required and Corey gets to enjoy the wonderful news without worry. If the house sells this fast, it’ll be a great development. It means she and Charles can move to that custom-built home in the country and really get the open outdoor space that they want.

She drifts into the kitchen, pours herself a half a glass of red and idly makes plans for her weekend, none of which involve housework.

Allow yourself some daydreaming. Conjure up your own vision statement, tailored just for you!