Organizing Hacks from the Life Changing Magic of Tidying up by Marie Kondo - Part 2

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video I’ll talk about Marie Kondo’s book the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up and 5 tips that I find really useful.  This is the second of a 2 part series. 

In the first video, I talked about how reading Marie Kondo’s book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up changed my overall philosophy about keeping things. In addition, I found 5 really great ideas that I still employ:

1. Cull, then organize - maybe this goes without saying, but a lot of people (including me historically) start by buying a bunch of organizing stuff and then make decisions about what to keep later.  The first step is getting rid of stuff. Once you have a smaller pile, then you organize.  Getting rid of stuff is the hard part. Do it first. 
2. Cull constantly - I tend to think of organizing like a project. When it’s done, it’s done!  Wrong. It is a process. Stuff wears out, goes out of style, becomes less endearing. Get rid of it.  For example, if I put on a piece of clothing, say a pair of pants, and I don’t like the way they fit or the way they feel?   I DO NOT hang it back up. I immediately put it in the donation bag conveniently located right in my closet. What are the odds that it will look better the next time I put it on?  Zero.  Life is too short to wear clothes that I don’t feel good in.  Plus it is a waste of time to hang it back up and try it on again with the exact same results. But this is true of everything — you have to constantly evaluate whether your belongings make the cut.  Be ruthless. 
3. Less is better - I’ve really had to deprogram myself around this concept. And I can easily slip back into old “more is better” thought patterns.  Here’s how I stop myself.  I determine a reasonable limit for a certain kind of object, create only enough spaces for that maximum number, and that serves to place the upper limit on how many I can own. Here are 2 examples. I used to have a bajillion knives. They all used to be piled into a drawer which made things difficult to locate and was kind of dangerous.  Now my knife drawer looks like this. There are only so many spaces, so it creates a physical and mental limit and I only keep the knives I really like. Here is another example — shoes. I have a bit of a shoe problem. So, I got rid of the ones I didn’t love and made spaces in my closet for 19 pairs of shoes per season.  That might seem RIDICULOUS.  But that is a hard limit for me.  If I bring a new pair in, an old pair has to go to make room. 
4. File Don’t Pile - this is simply Marie Kondo’s preference for the storing things standing up. And it’s another way to create limits and make everything you have visible. For example, if you store T-shirt’s in a drawer piled, you can just keep piling shirts on top and squishing them down. She has issues with feelings of the poor shirts squished at the bottom (I told you she has some voodoo ideas), but the problem I have is that you only really use the stuff on the top half and forget that you own the others.  Instead, she has you fold your T-shirt’s so that they are approximately the height of the drawer and file them vertically.  I love this and it’s strangely calming to fold your clothes this way — try it.  There are videos on line that show you her method of folding clothes. The same goes for almost anything that can be filed vertically, from make up to tools.  The goal is to make sure you can see everything.  She advocates using cardboard boxes to corralle objects. Cell phone boxes, shoe boxes and other dividers. You don’t have to spend a bunch of money on organizing tools — just use things you already have.  
5. 15 Minutes of Organizing - Marie Kondo claims that you do this one time and never have to do it again. She’s completely full of it. That makes sense for her because she loves to organize and is hyper vigilant.  The rest of us have constantly encroaching stuff that we are barely paying attention to until things start getting out of control. That is why I do 15 minutes of organizing every Saturday.  It’s only 15 minutes!  I use this time to cull items from a drawer, work on a pile that has developed in my kitchen, go through one small portion of a closet. It’s not so intimidating since it is only 15 minutes and it keeps that organizing muscle strong.  That way I don’t have to be hyper vigilant every day, but save it for 15 minutes of ruthless decision making on the weekends. 

Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!