Marie Kondo

Tidying in the end is just a physical act. The work involved can be broadly divided into two kinds: deciding whether or not to dispose of something and deciding where to put it. If you can do these two things, you can achieve perfection

Let’s imagine a cluttered room. It does not get messy all by itself. You, the person who lives in it, makes the mess. There is a saying that “a messy room equals a messy mind.” I look at it this way. When a room becomes cluttered, the cause is more than just physical.

Visible mess helps distract us from the true source of the disorder.

The act of cluttering is really an instinctive reflex that draws our attention away from the heart of an issue.

We need to exercise self-control and resist storing our belongings until we have finished identifying what we really want and need to keep.

This is why tidying must start with discarding

instead of deciding that today you’ll tidy a particular room, set goals like “clothes today, books tomorrow.”

When we disperse storage of a particular item throughout the house and tidy one place at a time, we can never grasp the overall volume and therefore can never finish

To escape this negative spiral, tidy by category, not by place.

Effective tidying involves only two essential actions: discarding and deciding where to store things. Of the two, discarding must come first.