I’m convinced. I need less stuff. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up has, as the title claims, changed my life.

I’ve read posts and books before on organisation and ‘speed cleaning’ and living simply, but this book was different. I think it’s largely because the author, Marie Kondo, is kind of crazy, in a totally endearing way. Her passion for tidying is so deep and real, you can’t help but be swept along by it. She’s Japanese and the book was presumably originally written in Japanese so there are somethings that I’m putting down to cultural differences/translation that kind of give the book, and her method, a bizarre, but comfortable, quirkiness. Although she explains that tidying is simply two physical actions – discarding and deciding where to store something – she also focuses heavily on the emotional and spiritual experience of tidying and living an uncluttered life.

My two key takeaways were firstly, decluttering starts with discarding. ‘Organising’ doesn’t actually solve the problem and and in fact ’storage solutions’ actually encourage hoarding. Before you start doing any kind of organising, rearranging etc, you first need to discard. It makes so much sense now but I admit I was one of those people who just thought I needed to get more ‘organised’ and would be easily lured by crates and containers and fancy storage shops.

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