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At first, I was intimidated by the lofty task of hand-picking recipients for hundreds of items, and then coordinating the exchange with each individual giftee. I even shamefully have to admit that there were a few failed experiments which resulted in completely failing to get the item to the recipients I'd chosen  After much trial and error, I finally found a system that worked for me, so here I'll share my tips if you decide to go this route for your discards!

- Don't do it all at once. If at all possible, pack your discards into bins and put most of it into storage. I picked up some gasket boxes for my garage and it was WELL WORTH the investment. Organizing my apartment before getting the discards out of the house was going to be an impossible task, so quickly moving my discards out of the way like this allowed me to get my apartment to a much more liveable state, which made processing the giveaways so much less stressful. Get your apartment in order first, then go back and process the rest of the discards in manageable chunks.

- Batch your giveaways based on how much time you can commit. For me, I found about 5-10 items made for a decent weekend errand. 30-40 is a full day task. Anything more than that is completely unmanageable for me.

- Individually photograph every item. At first I thought I would save myself time and effort by photographing many items at once. However, for large giveaways this became totally chaotic, as people were commenting in multiple places about the same items, and there wasn't one place I could check to see what the interest was for any particular item. It takes more work to photograph and upload each individual item, but it's well, well worth it for the sanity you'll gain later. When making my post, I uploaded all the photos into an album and requested that people comment on the individual photo rather than on the main thread.

- IF YOU HAVE A PORCH: Prefer pickups to dropoffs. Pick a pickup day upfront and let people know that selected recipients will have to come to pickup the item from your porch on that day. When pickup day comes along, you can set out everyone's pickup items in clearly marked bags and let them pick up the item whenever is convenient for them. This is by far the easiest method as it requires the least communication and coordination.

- IF YOU DON'T HAVE A PORCH: Prefer dropoffs to pickups. Without a porch to leave items on, pickups have to be coordinated individually with each person and for me got out of hand pretty quickly. Since I live in an apartment building with a security gate, the easiest thing for me was to pick one day to drop off all the items and then form a delivery route so I could drop off everything at once. Since the majority of people do have a spot I could leave the item without needing to coordinate with them coming to get the items specifically, this greatly reduced the amount of coordination required between me and my neighbors. Again, I announced the dropoff day and time when I made the post, and told people upfront that I'd be doing dropoffs. After I picked the recipients, instead of trying to juggle 20+ individual private conversations, I messaged each person a google form to collect their name, dropoff address, and instructions for where to drop it off. I then used a route optimizer to plan the order of my dropoffs. Doing all the dropoffs myself still took a significant amount of time, but it was way lower stress doing it all at once like this, and since I've been stuck at home for the past year it was actually pretty fun getting to drive around different parts of my neighborhood.

Overall, although gifting each individual item is a lot more taxing than simply dropping it all off at a donation site like in the Before Times, I actually have found the process to be extremely rewarding overall. I felt so much better knowing that my items were genuinely being given better homes, and it was a nice way to honor each item by holding it in my hands one last time and specifically choosing where it would go next. It was also a great way to get to know more people in my community, and seeing people's gratitude and generosity has really been a highlight of my past year 

Until next time!

The vast majority of my possessions fall into the category of komono, and somewhere in this category is when I started losing the most steam for the process. Leaving komono piles out for the duration of the sorting process was pretty uncomfortable and it almost made me give up several times. Here is where my to do lists came in clutch! Even if it felt hopeless in the broad scale, I tried my best to focus only on one section at a time until it had all been sorted. Aafter a long organizing process I finally was able to distill the process down to a few major questions.

If you want to follow along with this post for your own konmari you can download the printable here!

It's incredibly hard to decide where to put things if you don't know what your options are! To find out where to put things, I had to first discover where I could put things. So I think ideally step 1, before even starting to put anything away, is to just go down your komono list and picture where you would use these items during an ideal day. I got overwhelmed when I tried to think about exactly where each item should live, but thinking about the category broadly in terms of a general use was much easier to do!

Electronics would probably mainly be used in my living room, on my couch or at the TV. Board Games are used in the dining room where there's the most table space. I use skincare products in the bathroom where the sink is. Thinking through these categories as well as daydreaming about an ideal day in my life, I started getting a pretty clear picture about the "zones" in my apartment, and what function each one serves:

With the boxes clearly defined, the next step is to pick which box each category belongs to. This part became pretty easy when I was able to keep in mind the purpose of each space and what activities each category belongs to.

After laying all this out, all that remained was to play tetris with my items until it felt right. This still didn't always end up being easy, but it felt so much less daunting knowing exactly where I was ultimately trying to end up at the end of the day.

Clothing was the first category I tackled and also the category with the most instantaneous reward! It was the only category I bothered to keep track of the numbers. Excluding socks and underwear which I couldn't really be bothered to count, and not including bags or shoes which were their own subcategory, before the konmari process I counted 224 items in my wardrobe, which I pared down to 128 simply by discarding pieces that I didn't look forward to wearing again, either because it fit me wrong or just wasn't a style that I feel suits me. Honestly I was being pretty forgiving in what items I decided to keep, and I definitely would like to do a more stringent pass following the advice from The Curated Closet, but for now I think the results are already a huge step in the right direction.

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:

It's the middle of 2020 and I've been stuck in my apartment for months, so naturally it's been forcing me to confront my living space more than usual 

Actually I feel pretty okay about my apartment, which is new for me. Growing up I was an extremely messy and disorganized kid and my room routinely piled up with clutter. When I was living at home I'd always let my room pile up to an extreme point, and then spend an all day or all weekend effort putting things away until my room seemed sparkly clean! ...which would only last for a couple of days at most. Moving away for college I became gradually more organized, and I found a blog called Unfuck Your Habitat. The basic idea being, if you clean only in small bursts then eventually your brain will learn that cleaning isn't scary. Once cleaning up a little bit every day becomes part of your routine, you'll rarely get to a point where marathon cleaning is necessary. This technique has served me well, and it transformed the way I thought about cleaning or even approaching big scary tasks in general. Over time through practicing 20/10s, I was able to get into the habit of putting things away or tidying as soon as I see clutter forming. Between that and having purged my items casually while moving a couple of times, I have landed in a cute apartment surrounded by mostly cute objects that I love. Almost everything I own has a home, a spot where it lives in my house, and most things are reasonably organized.