I’ve said repeatedly that I felt the real issue with the Konmari Method was that it did not teach maintenance.
I have a detail cleaning schedule that I freely admit I snarfed and adapted from FlyLady. This week was supposed to be the floor and craft supplies in my closet. I was out of town visiting my family, so I did not do the “Little Chores” day by day as I usually do.
I was chewing on this on the train ride home, as I’ll skip cleaning closets whenever I can. I have hated cleaning out my closet since I was small.
I decided I’d just suck it up and do a week’s worth of detail cleaning in one day. I’d spent a lovely evening watching The Hunt for Red October and finishing a shawl I’d knitted on the spur of the moment for my mom. (I’m putting it in the mail for you on Monday!) With the enjoyment and relaxation of Cold War nostalgia and knitting under my belt, I felt ready for anything.
I emptied the floor of my closet, culled some craft supplies, got a stuck drawer in my craft bin unstuck, culled some bags and purses that don’t spark joy, vacuumed it, and then put everything away.
I Konmaried my house back in 2015. While I am dubious of the Tidy Forever promises, I think that Ms. Kondo has a point. I have, at least a couple of times a year, culled items from my closet that no longer sparked joy.
Even though I’d broken out the job into three planned fifteen-minute sessions spread out over a week, it really took less than half an hour.
Pre-Konmari?
That simply would not have been possible. I would have had too many possessions. Decision fatigue would have been quite real, and I would not have developed the habit of asking myself, “Does this spark joy?” and releasing any guilt I feel about releasing items I no longer want, need, or use. Nor would the “Fifteen minutes of decluttering a day” of my FlyLady days have addressed this, as I’d been doing FlyLady for a decade and a half (off and on) by then. I never addressed the closet enough to make its routine minor decluttering worth anything.
As I have stated repeatedly, I do not have a perfectly tidy home. I have a home tidy enough to make me happy and that’s all good. The public areas are far less than the fifteen minutes worth of messy at any time prescribed by FlyLady. Closets and drawers can be another matter, but I have a system to address them regularly that is much, much more useful and painless post-KonMari.
So, was Marie Kondo right? I’d love to hear your call on that!
I think so. I did the KonMari method a few years ago when the book was first published, and I did it again before we moved. Historically my dresser and closet are usually a hot mess. It’s been a lot easier to maintain. With the move, I finally invested in a couple of shoe racks that fit our closet exactly and some baskets for organizing folded sweaters and knitted things. Because I think *how* you organize your stuff is as important as how much you have or don’t have. The stacked vertically method has been a gamechanger for me.
I feel like every laundry day (which for me is once a week) is a good day to do a little closet/dresser tidy, so that’s when I do it, and plan to do a mini-Kon-Mari of the closet every season going forward.