The 8020librarian likes to impart the idea that not everything is important and that a single project or a few small things end up having a major impact.
Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” is well worth the read. The main take-away that I get is that by cleaning up you make a direct positive impact on your personal life. For me, while I have not completely gotten to where I need to be as a cleaner, I have noticed that mentally things become clearer after parting with possessions that I no longer need.
Conceptually, the two main tenets to Kondo’s cleaning philosophy are discarding and then deciding where to store things. Discarding is the most important and must come first. While, I can think of a number of questions to ask myself when discarding (i.e. Do I really need this? Who could use it?, etc.) Kondo’s main question for almost all the possessions you own is straightforward. She asks, does the item spark joy? Here we are not following rational thought, but rather intuition. If the possession does not spark joy, get rid of it.
For further reading, Kondo mentions the Art of Discarding by Nagisa Tatsumi.
I will be back in the next post with some of the tips I learned from the book about how often to tidy, the best way to tidy, and how to rethink our relationship to precious possessions.