Konmari Part 2: Sorting by Category

Marie Condo suggests dressing up slightly for the tidying process. I didn't really keep this up since dust allergies quickly made me too miserable to care about any of that, but at least I got dressed up once on the first day of the process!

The central portion of tidying with Marie Condo involves holding every item in your possession and asking yourself whether it sparks joy. A unique part of this process that I hadn't considered before is sorting items by category rather than by location. I think for me this was a huge change from how I normally tidy and although it was a struggle I think the results so far have been totally worth it! Normally when you tidy you'd tackle it room by room. But Marie Condo points out that by doing this you might end up with several different places where the same things are stored. This leaves you open to accidentally having an excess of the same item, or you might have to look around in multiple spots to finally find the exact item you're looking for. By tidying by category, not only do you get a bird's eye view into all the items you own, but it also makes it easier to put things back in a place where they really belong. 
Before beginning this process I was really guilty of this. I had electronics scattered in every room of my house; my sewing items and cleaning items were taking up space in my kitchen and old notebooks took up prime real estate on my shelves just because I didn't know where else to put them! So tidying by category is something I was really eager to try.

After skimming the sections outlined in the book, I took some time to walk around my apartment and tried to fit everything I owned into the categories. After adding a few categories of my own for items that didn't cleanly fit into any other categories (mostly related to speciality hobbies) these are the categories that I settled on:

When tidying I worked through this list pretty diligently. I tackled one category at a time, and finished one completely before beginning the next. I tried not to do much organizing between categories however. For me a category was "done" only after sorting every item in the category into "sparks joy (keeping)" or "does not spark joy (departing)". So after starting a category, I'd first comb through my entire apartment - even rooms I was pretty sure shouldn't contain anything from this category - and place every item in the center of either my living room or bedroom. Once I was pretty sure I had collected every item into the pile, I'd proceed to sort each item. Once I was done, the stuff that was going got moved into a big pile of things to sell or donate, or thrown out immediately depending on the condition of the item. As for the stuff I kept, I keep the whole pile together and set it somewhere out of the way. Because my apartment is small, it wasn't realistic to have literally every item I own on piles on the floor, so for certain categories if I was extremely confident about where the items would live, I might set the pile down on the shelf or cupboard where I know it will eventually go, but that's the extent of organization I did up to this point. This feels a little extreme, because soon your entire living space becomes almost uninhabitable, with category piles littering every walkway. The reason I choose not to organize as I went along is because I wanted to make sure that when I put things back, they were really going where I thought they should be rather than just where there happened to be an empty space. It's really easy for me to discount a storage option blindly simply because something else is already stored there. So, for me, I think it was worth the pain so that I could proceed to the organizing step knowing exactly what I was trying to organize and with a blank slate of empty cabinets to put them in.

In hindsight, a couple of categories probably should have been split into two, so here's the revised category list that reflects how I actually processed my items:

Clothing

  • clothes
  • bags
  • shoes

Books

Papers

Komono

  • CD's/DVD's
  • Skin care
  • Hair care
  • Makeup
  • Accessories
  • Cosplay
  • Photography/video equipment
  • Electronics
  • Stationary
  • Sewing
  • Yarn
  • Crafts
  • Household supplies (Medicine, laundry detergent, tissues, toiletries, etc)
  • Tools and home improvement
  • Household appliances
  • Cleaning supplies
  • Kitchen goods and appliances
  • Spices, sauces, and alcohol
  • Figures
  • Anime merch
  • Plushies
  • Board games
  • Music books and instruments
  • Gifts (for others)
  • Art and decorations
  • Seasonal
  • Valuables (passport, credit cards, etc)

Sentimental items



So... How did I do? 

Donate pile after the sorting process.
Sell pile after the sorting process.

Overall I'm really proud of how much I was able to let go of! I was taking a pretty relaxed approach to it, considering an item to have "sparked joy" even if just the thought of someday using it made me happy to think about, without having concrete plans to use it in the near future. I didn't follow Marie Condo's advice to the letter about throwing out anything you're not actively using, because as a full time worker with a lot of hobbies that's just not realistic for me. Having lots of hobbies at my disposal is part of my ideal lifestyle, and many of these hobbies have a pretty high cost of entry at the beginning. So, even though I might not have time to continue my language studies for another several months, or I don't have concrete plans to continue practicing music, it was still important for me to hold onto these items for the day when that inspiration strikes me. I think Marie Condo would agree that since it sparks joy, I absolutely must keep it!
Despite this, with only a few exceptions I still threw out close to 50% of my items in most categories! It really feels good to be getting rid of so many items that I absolutely do not look forward to using again in the future.

I'm still in the middle of the organizing process, but I hope I can write more about the tidying process soon!

Until next time,


P.S. : This is part 2 in my Konmari series! Click the links below to read the rest.
on
Labels: ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)