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Adventures in Organization: Konmari Method

Hello!

Today, I finally finished going through the Konmari method with all of the belongings that I have at my parents' house. The Konmari method was created by Marie Kondo, who instructs her clients to declutter their belongings by category. The five categories are:

  1. Clothes
  2. Books
  3. Papers
  4. Komono (miscellaneous items)
  5. Sentimental Items
Followers of the Konmari method are supposed to gather all of the items that belong in a category and hold them up, item by item, to determine if they spark joy. If an item is neither useful nor joy-inspiring, the Konmari practitioner should get rid of it. 

I started off gamely with the "clothes" category. Gathering all of my clothes was easy, since most of my clothes already live together in a carry-on suitcase. The problem came once I had finished sorting through my clothes, and realized that I had wound up with only three short-sleeved shirt options* remaining. While I had kept several shirts for sentimental reasons, I was determined not to wear them anymore. Fortunately, I only had to deal with this dire situation for a few days before going shopping with a friend and finding clothes that I liked better.

Image of my suitcase post-Konmari method. My suitcase contains two nightgowns and a pair of pajama pants in the top row, and two pairs of leggings, three pairs of pants, a pair of brown cargo shorts, a Soka sweatshirt, a long-sleeved shirt, and three short-sleeved shirts.

These are the aforementioned clothes that I kept for sentimental reasons. Shirts featured are: my class shirt from my first year of college, a shirt that everyone signed at camp for my birthday, my mom's old McMurry sweatshirt, a shirt that I drew and wrote on in marker during my second summer as a counselor-in-training, an official Mountain Friends Camp shirt, a jellyfish shirt that I designed for my Quaker meeting, and my high school "Straight Outta Chandler Prep" class shirt.

The "books" category involved a little bit more of an internal struggle. Many of the books that I have here are old high school "disposables" (non-textbook required books). Initially, I thought that I was ready to part with all of these books, but seeing them again made me want to hold onto some of them. The massive pile of books on my bed motivated me to sort quickly, and to only keep the books that I really would consider reading again. 

My books pre-Konmari. Four tall stacks of books are lined up on my bed, with a pile of papers and miscellaneous items poorly concealed behind them.

The "papers" category was barely relevant to my situation here. Most of the papers I have are either (a) actual literal trash, or (b) old standardized test scores that are not precisely mine to throw away. It was pretty easy to throw away the trash and keep everything else. 

The "komono" category was where I began to run into trouble. How was I supposed to figure out what was a miscellaneous item and what was a sentimental item? How many years does a random piece of junk have to be held onto before it becomes a precious memento of a lost era? I erred on the side of categorizing the majority of possibly sentimental items as sentimental items. Even after making this decision, it was difficult to motivate myself to finish this category. I moved the remaining items to my desk on the night of my first day with this category, and then just kind of...left them for a few days. Finally, I set a timer for 30 minutes and (with a spirit more characterized by desperation than joy-seeking) sorted through the remainder of the miscellaneous items. 

At last, I reached the final category: "sentimental items". At first, sorting through sentimental items was an enjoyable experience. While I often got distracted by an old journal, I enjoyed putting my memories in their proper places. As time went on, however, I found myself sorting through items that I cared about less, and trying to shove them into my rapidly diminishing drawer space. As I did with the miscellaneous items, I moved the sentimental items to my desk and sorted through them very slowly for a couple days. I chose this blog post topic primarily to motivate myself to actually finish this process. 

Overall, this was a helpful process that I'm hoping to recover from before attempting it with my belongings back at Soka. I will say that the Konmari method has inspired some disastrous thinking on my part when encountering hidden belongings, and that I now overreact whenever I find some unexpected junk that I now have to sort. Still, I think that this process was relatively successful, and I would do it over again. 

Best wishes,
Lydia

* In the interest of full transparency, I am counting two of my shirts as one "short-sleeve shirt option", because one of the shirts is too small to be suitable for anything other than as an unbuttoned layer over the other shirt.
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