Are you bothered by a messy room? Do you feel stressed facing several projects and just don't want to start working? The Japanese tidying queen Marie Kondo may show you a way to fix the problems. This blog tells my story of how I applied the KonMari method to tidy my life to become efficient and the lessons I learned.

Why do I want to tidy my home?

I am in the last year of my Ph.D. program. I have to handle multiple research projects and to write dissertation and research papers. I feel stressed and I start to procrastinate. I have been fighting procrastination for years by reading books and finding tips online. Most of them work for a while, but life bounces back quickly. At the end of 2017, when I looked around my home: clothes piled up on my couch and my bed; plates and bowls spread over the table; shoes were anywhere on the floor. The chaos had lasted for years and there was no sign of an end. I wanted a change. Tidying my home might be a good starting point for the coming 2018. So, I typed 'tidying book' on Amazon.com and found the best seller 'The life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up' by Marie Kondo. After reading a few pages, I was hooked and my old knowledge on tidying was totally cracked down. I bought the book, read through it in two days, and applied the method to my home. Finally, my life changed.

How does it work?

The messy room is just a mirror of the messy mind. The core of KonMari's method is to tidy the mind up, to keep the items that can spark joy in your life, and to discard all the others. Additionally, you have to do it thoroughly and decisively in the shortest time. Lastly, it may help to apply the method to categories in the following order: clothes and shoes, books, papers, small items, and souvenirs.

I'll explain the steps with my clothing category. First, I put all my clothes from all possible places in my home on my bed (or on the floor if you have too many). Make sure that you find all of them. If you later find more clothes, you have to toss them right away. Just by watching the pile of my clothes, I was shocked how many clothes I had. Most of them were in bad conditions or were forgotten in the closet for years. Second, I picked up each of them and felt whether it made me happy (sparking joy in Marie's words). If it did, I kept it. If not, I said thank you for its service and put it in a garbage bag in a respectful manner. The pile of clothes reduced its size after I did the procedure dozens of times. I discarded a lot of clothes that were still relatively new but I didn't like very much. I felt happier because I liked all the clothes left and I had made dozens of decisions. It may sound silly, but there was a moment I felt I could control my life.

In the next few days, I applied the procedure to my books, kitchen, garage and most importantly to the 1TB files on my computers. As a geophysicist doing numerical modeling on supercomputers, I had a lot of files that I had no idea what they were about. After indexing the ones that I could still identify and cleaning the others, three projects that I was working on showed themselves orderly on the screen. At that moment, I realized that priorities and important things would present themselves if you discarded the insignificant and trivial stuff. Even though I didn’t have a lot of stuff, I discarded seven 13-gallon garbage bags of items.

A chain of magic 'chemical reactions'

My initiation was to become efficient in my work by tidying my messy home. I have reached the goal. But I have gained more. First, I know my priorities. Everyone can only manage well a few projects and needs a limited number of essentials in life. More projects will only increase your psychological burden. The resultant stress procrastinates you. By discarding the insignificant and trivial stuff, you'll have a clear idea what you are going to deal with. Second, I have become more decisive. After I did the procedure of KonMari method a hundred of times, it was crystal clear to me that I could improve my life through the practice of making decisions. I used to worry about the results of bad decisions. The consequence of hesitating was a waste of time with no improvement in results. Even worse, I procrastinated because of my indecisiveness. Third, I become more motivated. In the last month, simply because I was too busy to push forward my three research projects, to manage my investment portfolios, and to start my hobby of writing, I didn't have time to think about my old procrastination. It is not entirely gone, but it is not a problem anymore. Lastly, I become grateful for life and everything that I have after I thanked each item that served me well in the past. And so on, and on.

Conclusion

Rome wasn't built in a day. Old habits and laziness attack me once in a while. But my mindset has changed, my home has become tidy, and I have become far more efficient. I sincerely don't want to go back. As quoted in the book, ‘if you adopt the method, you’ll never revert to clutter again.’ So, the only direction is to march into the future. The Japanese tidying queen Marie Kondo has changed my life. I wish she might change yours as well.

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Dunyu Liu
Dunyu is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geophysics