Hirano Cathy - The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying

Contents

Transform your home into a permanently clear and clutter-free space with the incredible KonMari Method. Japans expert declutterer and professional cleaner Marie Kondo will help you tidy your rooms once and for all with her inspirational step-by-step method.

The key to successful tidying is to tackle your home in the correct order, to keep only the things you really love and to do it all at once and quickly. After that for the rest of your life you only need to choose what to keep and what to discard.

The KonMari Method will not just transform your space. Once you have your house in order you will find that your whole life will change. You can feel more confident, you can become more successful, and you can have the energy and motivation to create the life you want. You will also have the courage to move on from the negative aspects of your life: you can recognise and finish a bad relationship; you can stop feeling anxious; you can finally lose weight.

Marie Kondos method is based on a once-cleaned, never-messy-again approach. If you think that such a thing is impossible then you should definitely read this compelling book.

MARIE KONDO (KonMari) started reading housewives magazines from the age of five and loved the order and beauty of the well-organised spaces she saw in them. From the age of 15 she started studying tidying seriously. She started with her own bedroom and then moved onto her siblings. Today she runs a highly successful business in Tokyo helping clients transform their cluttered homes into spaces of beauty, peace and inspiration.

HAVE YOU EVER tidied madly, only to find that all too soon your home or workspace is cluttered again? If so, let me share with you the secret of success. In this book, I have summed up how to put your space in order in a way that will change your life forever. Impossible? This is a common response and not surprising considering that almost everyone has experienced a rebound effect at least once, if not many times, after tidying their home.

The KonMari Method is a simple, smart and effective way to banish clutter forever. Start by discarding. Then organise your space, thoroughly, completely, in one go. If you adopt this strategy, youll never revert to clutter again.

Although this approach contradicts conventional wisdom, everyone who completes the KonMari Method has successfully kept their house in order with unexpected results. Putting their house in order positively affects all other aspects of their lives including work and family. Having devoted over 80 per cent of my life to this subject, I know that tidying can transform your life too.

Does it still sound too good to be true? If your idea of tidying is getting rid of one unnecessary item a day or cleaning up your room a little at a time, then you are right. It wont have much effect on your life. If you change your approach, however, tidying can have an immeasurable impact. In fact, that is what it means to put your house in order.

I started reading housewives magazines when I was five, and it was this that inspired me, from the age of 15, to undertake the serious study of decluttering and tidying that led to the KonMari Method (KonMari is my nickname, taken from my first and last names). I am now a consultant and spend most of my days visiting homes and offices, giving hands-on advice to people who find it difficult to tidy, who tidy but suffer rebound, or who want to tidy but dont know where to start.

The amount of things my clients have discarded, from clothes and undergarments to photos, pens, magazine clippings and make-up samples, easily exceeds a million items. This is no exaggeration. I have assisted individual clients who have thrown out 200 45-litre bin bags in one go.

From my exploration of the art of organising and my vast experience of helping disorganised people to become tidy, there is one thing I can say with confidence: a dramatic reorganisation of the home causes correspondingly dramatic changes in your lifestyle and perspective. It is life-transforming. I mean it. Here are just a few of the testimonies I receive on a daily basis from former clients:

After your course, I quit my job and launched my own business doing something I had dreamed of doing ever since I was a child.

Your course taught me to see what I really need and what I dont. So I got a divorce. Now I feel much happier.

Someone I have been wanting to get in touch with recently contacted me.

Im delighted to report that since cleaning up my apartment, Ive been able to really increase my sales.

My husband and I are getting along much better.

Im amazed to find that just throwing things away has changed me so much.

I finally succeeded in losing three kilos.

My clients always sound so happy and the results show that tidying has changed their way of thinking and their approach to life. In fact, it has changed their future. Why? This question is addressed in more detail throughout this book, but basically, when you put your house in order, you put your affairs and your past in order, too. As a result, you can see quite clearly what you need in life and what you dont, what you should and shouldnt do.

I currently offer a course for clients in the home and for company owners in their offices. These are all private, one-on-one lessons, but I have yet to run out of clients. There is currently a three-month waiting list, and I receive enquiries daily from people who have been introduced by a former client or who have heard about the course from someone else. I travel from one end of Japan to the other and sometimes overseas. Tickets for one of my public talks for housewives and mothers sold out overnight. There was a waiting list not only for cancellations, but also just to get on the waiting list. Yet my repeater rate is zero. From a business perspective, this would appear to be a fatal flaw. But what if no repeaters were actually the secret to the popularity of my approach?

As I said at the beginning, people who use the KonMari Method never revert to clutter again. Because they can keep their space in order, they dont need to come back for more lessons. I occasionally check in with graduates of my courses to see how they are doing. In almost every case, not only is their home or office still in order, but also they are continuing to improve their space. It is evident from the photographs they send that they have even fewer belongings than when they finished the course, and have acquired new curtains and furnishings. They are surrounded only by the things they love.

Why does my course transform people? Because my approach is not simply a technique. The act of tidying is a series of simple actions in which objects are moved from one place to another. It involves putting things away where they belong. This seems so simple that even a six-year-old should be able to do it. Yet most people cant. A short time after tidying, their space is a disorganised mess. The cause is not lack of skills but rather lack of awareness and the inability to tidy effectively. In other words, the root of the problem lies in the mind. Success is 90 per cent dependent on our mindset. Excluding the fortunate few to whom organising comes naturally, if we do not address this aspect, rebound is inevitable no matter how much is discarded or how cleverly things are organised.

So how can you acquire the right kind of mindset? There is just one way and, paradoxically, it is by acquiring the right technique. Remember: The KonMari Method I describe in this book is not a mere set of rules on how to sort, organise and put things away. It is a guide to acquiring the right mindset for creating order and becoming a tidy person.