The magical power of cleaning. Marie Kondo Magic cleaning. Japanese art of putting things in order at home and in life. The main secret is vertical storage

The first step is to create a picture of your ideal home in your head. Colors, volumes, decorative elements, light... Marie Kondo's technique is not to free up space at any cost, but to "arrange it to create the conditions for living that you like."

2. Tune in

While the head is crammed with everyday affairs, it will not work to deal with the chaos in the house. Don't panic when looking at mountains of things. Choose a quiet place where you can appreciate the place of each object in your universe. Anything that will allow you to enter this state will do: soft, unobtrusive music or the murmur of the TV. But the best ally is silence.

"Things hidden from view are usually not used for years"

3. Make a decision right away

When you feel ready, start sorting things. First of all, decide what items are not needed. For best results, stick to the following rule: either discard the excess immediately, or put it in its place.

4. No "just in case"

The only question worth asking when looking at each item is: “Does it give me joy?” If the answer is "no" - you know what to do. Quite often we are tormented by doubts: “Maybe I still need it? I can always throw it away." Hesitation means you are attached to the thing. Remember when and why you bought it. Is it as important to you today as it was before?

5. Sort things by category, not by room

Chaos is when things do not have their own place and they randomly wander from one corner to another. Keep everything in the same category in one place. Look around the house for the same type of items (cleaning products, jewelry, cosmetics). Lay them out on the floor in groups. So you can estimate the volume of things belonging to one category, and understand how and where it is better to store them.

6. Do not fill boxes more than 90%

Storage spaces packed to capacity are black holes. What is hidden from view is usually not used for years. We forget about pots and socks and notebooks that are barricaded in closets and chests of drawers. “We tend to try to fill in the gaps,” says Marie Kondo, “But if the goal is order, it’s better to have everything in sight. Limit yourself to one or two rows so that you can look at the contents of each shelf.

7. Fold clothes with origami

Randomly folded clothes take up more space and create a sense of clutter. The best way to avoid this - always put things in the same pattern. Use the Japanese origami technique. "Practice a few times - and you will do it automatically every time, like a robot," says the expert.


8. Create your "place of power"

A comfortable sofa, a table fenced off by a screen, a rocking chair - there should be a place in the house that will serve as a refuge (or den). “Having personal space is very important for mental comfort. It will warm you from the inside, like a warm cat in your bosom in the winter cold, ”says the coach. A small corner is enough.

9. Deal with the past

Things that are precious as a memory of the emotions associated with them are not only "long-lived" in our home, but also the main source of disorder. How can you throw away this ticket to a concert where you had such a good time? And this camera that your grandfather used to take pictures of you as a child? Precious memories will not disappear even if you part with their physical embodiment. If necessary, spend some time with your valuable item. Photograph it, describe it. Come to terms with the fact that it no longer belongs to your life today. It is important to part with the past in order to make room for the present and the future - literally and figuratively.

10. Use things wisely

To keep things in order every day, Marie Kondo advises following certain rituals: always return things to their place, thank them for being able to use them, and take care of them. “When you finish putting the house in order, it will become clear to you what the meaning and purpose of each thing is,” explains the coach. - You will understand their true value and learn to consciously handle them. Such an approach is a guarantee not only of physical purity, but also of mental clarity and inner harmony.”

About the expert

Marie Kondo- Consultant for organizing home life, author of the bestseller “Magical Cleaning. The Japanese art of putting things in order at home and in life” (Eksmo, 2016).

    Rated the book

    So, now I will tell you in a nutshell what the catch is: we take and throw out 2/3 of the property. With the rest of the third we conduct sincere conversations, arrogantly silent and arguing we throw out. We roll the rest into rolls and put them in shoe boxes. Profit! Now you have an eternal holiday and a complete absence of a mess, because you have mutual understanding with the rolls and they will never roll obscenely anywhere.

    Selected quotes:

    It's like a sudden revelation - so this is how you want to be stacked! - a special moment when there is contact between your mind and a piece of clothing. I really like to see how the faces of my clients clear up at this moment.

    Well, I see that my life is moving exactly along this path: sometimes it's really more pleasant to discuss something with your socks than with some people. But for now, I'm not ready for it.

    Arrange your clothes so that they "rise to the right." Draw an arrow going up and to the right, and then another going down to the right. You can do this on a piece of paper or just a couple of strokes in the air. Have you noticed the feeling of lightness that comes when you draw an up and right arrow?
    Let's agree here and now: never, in any case, do not bandage your tights and stockings. Never, ever roll your socks into a ball. I pointed her to the sock balls. “Look at them closely. Socks should have time to rest. Do you really think that you can rest in this form?

    In this place I burst into tears, over the fate of socks.

    You read books to relive the experience of reading. The books you have read have already been experienced, and their content is within you, even if you don't remember it. So, when deciding which books to keep, forget to think that you will re-read them again, and do not think about whether you have learned their contents. Instead, take each book in your hands and decide whether it touches you or not. Keep only those books that will make you feel happy just by looking at them, only those books whose presence on your bookshelves awakens love in you.
    Perhaps you wanted to read it when you bought it, but if you haven't read it yet, then the purpose of this book is to tell you that you don't need it.

    Yes Yes. I have two thirds of the entire library.
    Further about the books the following: if you are touched by individual quotes in the book, then it is easier and faster to cut them out. I think it's time to write to the Japanese librarians to give Mari and her publishers seppuku or worse for calling for vandalism.

    As far as toilet paper is concerned, the record stock has so far been 80 rolls. “You see, I have a weak intestine… I use it very quickly,” was the client’s argument. But even if she used a roll a day, she had at least three months' supply. I’m not sure that she could use a roll a day, even if she didn’t leave the toilet at all, and the “fifth point” with this mode can be erased to the bone. It even crossed my mind that I should have given her a softening cream instead of giving cleaning lessons.

    Hello, toilet humor and reading other people's rolls. What is the business of the leader of some training, how many greyhound puppies wipe the client?

    Although she had been interested in spirituality before my course, after listening to my course to the end, she told me with satisfaction: "Cleaning has a much stronger effect than feng shui, or power stones, or other spiritual things." From that moment on, she threw herself headlong into new life, left her previous job and found a publisher for her book.

    High spirituality and other spiritual things.

    Even if you throw away these things or burn them, they will leave behind only the energy of the desire to be useful. Released from their physical form, they will live in your world as energy, letting other things know that you are a special person, and returning to you in the form of the thing that will be most useful to you now, the thing that will bring you the most happiness. An article of clothing may return as a beautiful new outfit, or it may reappear as information or a new connection. I promise you: everything that you part with will return to you in exactly the same amount, but only when it feels a desire to return to you.

    Also here and there in the text it is constantly mentioned that the author has been fond of cleaning since the age of five and that, trying different methods, she constantly threw out crazy thousands of bags of things. I understand that in free time from throwing it away, she bought everything back.
    As a result, all the same, two and a half for what motivates me to go and throw it out (actually, the inscription on the fence "Go throw it out!" Would probably motivate me) and for being funny. I'm glad I didn't buy this book.

    Rated the book

    Marie Kondo, I think a great fellow. Her obsession with cleaning could have turned into a full-fledged neurosis, but it turned out to be a calling.

    Let's immediately dot all the i's. This method is not suitable for everyone and not everyone needs it. Some don't need any methods at all. They have either already found a way to maintain an acceptable level of order in their home, or they have never bothered to look for it. Marie Kondo's book is for those who are annoyed by the number of things in the house and clutter with constant attempts to organize the rational storage of these things. It is for those who yearn for simplicity, cleanliness and spaciousness.

    Marie Kondo is not suggesting getting rid of everything. Her method is just the opposite. leave things, but only those that you like, that you need, that you enjoy using. This is not asceticism, this is hedonism in its purest form. You surround yourself with things that you really like, and this adds to everyday life some more joy. A place where you feel good is especially important to have. We spend a lot of time at home, our life is here - private, family, as relaxed as possible. It acquires a completely different quality when you like the living space. In addition, this approach largely solves the issue of storage. After a thorough cleaning, it turns out that you no longer need to think about how and where to store all that junk that you didn’t need.

    Kondo's thoughts about clothing seem particularly sensible to me. The closet is breaking, there is nothing to wear. Naturally, because among this useless abundance you will never understand what you have and what you really lack. Many have a lot of things with flaws: this one does not fit well, that one is tired, the third one has a stain, and the fourth one was bought in the hype of sales and has never been worn at all. These things take the place of what you would actually wear. Nominally, you have them, but they do not fulfill their functions, creating only the illusion of a full-fledged wardrobe. About home clothes in general a separate issue. I've suspected for a long time that I wear the top three of the entire stack of home jerseys, and the rest are just extras.

    Great idea for the vertical arrangement of things in drawers. I would use it, but I don't have drawers, only shelves. You can be ironic about folding socks as much as you like, but when folded, they really take up much less space and look much neater. As for wasting time, everyone decides for themselves when to spend it: in the process of folding or in the process of finding the right pair (or even just two identical socks) in a messy pile.

    Books. A sore point for many, judging by the reviews. Now I'm going to say a terrible, criminal thing. I threw away three books. Basically, in the trash. I donated five more to the library. I thought that if I ever wanted to read them, I could take them there. Not only do I love to read paper books - they are also my work, but I am far from giving sacred meaning to any mass of paper just because it has been given the form of a code. By the way, there were two bags of garbage on the bookshelves, and my shelves are not at all gigantic. Some envelopes, card-account agreements for plastic cards that I no longer have, photographs for documents (of course, I came out terribly there), instructions and disks for a laptop (I have another one for two years), old notebooks, folders, even clippings from magazines - I still cannot understand why all this was kept. I agree with Marie Kondo that things can lose their meaning and meaning over time. Memories associated with them are forgotten or cease to be pleasant. Life changes, interests change, we change, so how can all things remain invariably important and desirable?

    “Magical Cleaning” is a book about transforming living space, about putting things in order in your own attitude to things. Use what brings pleasure; know exactly what you need; buy consciously; it is easy to part with things that have served their purpose - is this not a way out of that sea of ​​​​everything that is offered and sold?

    P.S. And yes, I folded my socks. I don't know how they are, but my husband is happy. Two weeks have passed, the order is perfect.

    Photo under the cut

    I'm sorry if I'm being a curmudgeon, but I don't think postcards are trash. For me, it's a memory. The same goes for photographs - if I printed them, then I need them, this is a memory and positive emotions. Although Marie Kondo claims that no one in old age looks at postcards of youth, I sometimes look at and reread postcards from 15 years ago. Yes, it's probably nostalgia. Marie believes that you need to appreciate the present and be grateful to the past, which led us to this present. Therefore, it’s not a good idea to keep all the rare nostalgic junk. I will share with you a secret: in my youth I kept a diary, I had 5 (?) thick, written notebooks. Then, in a fit of some kind of littering, I threw them out. And then she regretted it more than once.
    Throwing away little things like key chains and souvenirs given by someone ... Well, how can you ...
    I think the KonMari method is to throw away everything you don't use. The result is an ascetic house.

    Yes, perhaps it is a different mentality, culture, traditions. Still, East and West are very different. But I'm not ready to follow the Japanese guru's method of being left without memorabilia that is dear to my heart, just because someone considers it trash.

    In general, I only took note of the folding method that I looked at on YouTube. I’m still trying, but I’m not sure that with this method my closet will always be in perfect order.

    From myself I will say: there is no such order that can be brought only once, as Marie Kondo claims. Order must be maintained, otherwise it will still turn into a mess.

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"Magical Cleaning" by Marie Kondo is a book that has taught millions of people around the world to clean up their homes and lives. Translated into many languages, it helps to get rid of the unnecessary and eventually surround yourself with only those things that "touch" the heart.

website decided to write about the main secrets of this book.

First you need to get rid of unnecessary once and for all

To put things in perfect order in the house, you need to stop shifting things from place to place. First of all, it is worth understanding what of them huge amount worthy of continuing to live in your home. As a result, you will be able to make room for a truly your things and create your space.

1. Does this thing cause joy?

Take each thing in your hands and ask yourself just one question: “Does this thing cause joy?” Leave only what makes you feel bright positive emotions. Surround yourself with a world of things that give you confidence and strength, perfect for you. And this applies to everything: from jackets and skirts to books and photographs.

The mistake of many is that they clean the rooms and endlessly stumble upon the same things, never understanding what their total number is. Marie Kondo advises collect all things of one category together and only then decide what to leave and what not. So you can evaluate the total amount of things and leave only the best.

3. Vertical storage

The basic storage principle that Marie Kondo "invented" is vertical storage. If you arrange things vertically, then it is already impossible to forget about them. They do not stay down under a bunch of other things and continue to "work", as shown. In addition, this is how things hold their shape longer and better.

4. Products

Basic foodstuffs are sold in colorful boxes, jars and bottles. Together, these packages create "information noise" that attacks a person as soon as he enters the kitchen or opens the closet door. But if you tear off the labels or pour the products into a “clean” container, the “noise” will disappear on its own. And the shelves, as shown, look much better.

5. Clothes

The most important thing in storing clothes is to see everything that you wear in any given season. Suitable for wardrobes and hangers. It is better to store things of the same type and color together so as not to constantly buy the same thing. It is better to hang clothes so that long things are on the left, and short things are on the right. This will create the effect of lightness and soaring of the entire wardrobe, as shown.

6. Bags

Empty bags every day. So you can give the bag a "rest" and at the same time understand what things you will not need the next morning. And to keep the bags in shape, store them one in one. It will also save a lot of space. For everyday documents, get a box from where you can easily pick up papers every day. And such organizers will save a lot of space in the wardrobe.

7. Photos

Marie Kondo

Magic cleaning. The Japanese Art of Tidying Up Your Home and Life

Foreword



The KonMari method is simple. It's witty and effective method defeat clutter forever. Start by getting rid of the trash. Then organize your space - carefully, completely, in one go. If you adopt this strategy, you will never go back to clutter again.

Although this approach is contrary to popular belief, anyone who applies the KonMari method to the fullest successfully maintains order in his house - and with unexpected results. Putting your house in order has a positive effect on all other aspects of life - including work and family. Having dedicated more than 80 percent of my life to this topic, I I know that cleaning can transform your life.

Do you still think it sounds too good to be true? If your idea of ​​cleaning is to get rid of one unnecessary item a day or clean your room little by little, then you are right. It is unlikely to seriously affect your life in any way. However, if you change your approach, cleaning can have a truly immeasurable impact. In essence, this is what it means to put your house in order.

I've been reading housewife magazines since I was five years old, and that's what inspired me, starting at the age of fifteen, to get serious about finding the perfect way to clean. Which, in turn, led to the creation of the KonMari Method (KonMari is my pseudonym, composed of the first syllable of my last name and first name). I am now a consultant and spend most of my time visiting homes and offices giving practical advice to people who find cleaning difficult, who clean but suffer backlash, or who want to clean but don't know where to start. .

...

Putting things in order in the house, you put things in order in life.

From clothing and underwear to photographs, pens, magazine clippings, and makeup trials, my clients' discarded items must have been over a million by now. This is not an exaggeration. I have helped individual clients who have thrown out two hundred 45-liter garbage bags at a time.

As a result of research into the art of organizing and my extensive experience in helping disorganized people who want to become tidy, there is one conviction that I can state with absolute certainty: a significant reorganization of the house causes an equally significant change in lifestyle and worldview. She transforms life. I am not kidding. Here are just a few of the testimonials I receive daily from former clients.


“After completing your courses, I quit my job, started my own business and now do what I have dreamed of doing since I was a child.”

“Your course helped me understand what I really need and what I don’t. So I filed for divorce. Now I feel much happier."

“Recently, I was contacted by a person with whom I have long wanted to meet.”

"I'm happy to report that after I cleaned my apartment, I was able to significantly increase sales."

“There was a much greater rapport between me and my husband.”

“I was surprised to find that by throwing out some things, I changed myself in many ways.”

“I finally managed to lose three kilograms.”


My clients are glowing with happiness and the results show that cleaning has changed the way they think and approach life. In fact, she changed their future. Why? A more detailed answer to this question is given throughout the book; but, in a nutshell, by putting his house in order, a person puts his affairs and his past in order. As a result, he quite clearly understands what he needs in life and what he does not need, what is worth doing and what is not worth doing.

I currently offer classes for clients in their homes and for business owners in their offices. All these are private lessons, taking place one on one with the client, but there is no end to those who wish. Currently, my waiting list is three months long, and I receive daily inquiries from people who have been referred to me by former clients or who have heard about my course from someone else. I travel around Japan from end to end, and sometimes I go abroad. One of my public lectures for housewives and mothers sold out in one evening. Not only was a waiting list drawn up in case of refusal from classes, but also a list of those who simply wanted to get on the waiting list. However, the number of repeated calls to me is zero. From a business standpoint, this may seem like a fatal flaw. But what if the lack of retries is actually the secret to the effectiveness of my approach?

As I said at the very beginning, people who use the KonMari method never litter their homes and offices again. Since they are able to maintain order in their space, there is no need to re-come to class. From time to time I contact people who have completed my courses and find out how they are doing. In almost all cases, their home or office is still in order; Moreover, they also continue to improve their space. The photographs they send me show that they now have even fewer things than they had when they completed my course, and that they have acquired new curtains and furniture. They are surrounded only by the things they truly love.

Why is this course transforming people? Because my approach is not just a technical method. The act of cleaning is a series of simple actions in which objects are moved from one place to another. It involves moving things to the places where they should be. It seems so simple that even a six-year-old child should be able to do it. However, most people fail to do so. Soon after cleaning, their space turns back into a chaotic mess. The reason for this is not a lack of skills, but rather a lack of awareness and an inability to clean effectively. In other words, the root of the problem is in the mind. Success is 90 percent dependent on our mental attitude. If excluded from total number for the lucky few people for whom ordering is a natural process, for everyone else, if we do not focus on this aspect, the backlash is inevitable, no matter how many things are thrown away or how intelligently the rest are ordered.

So how do you get this right mental attitude? There is only one way to do this, and, paradoxically, that way is to acquire the right way. Remember: The KonMari Method that I describe in this book is not just a set of sorting, ordering, and storage rules. This is a guide to getting the right mindset to create order and make you a neat person.

Of course, I cannot say that all my students have mastered the art of cleaning to perfection. Unfortunately, some, for one reason or another, had to abort the course without completing it. And others stopped classes because they expected that I would do all the work for them.

As a fanatic and organiser, I can tell you right now: no matter how hard I try to organize another person's space, no matter how perfect the storage system I develop, I will never be able to put another person's house in order in the true sense of the word. Why? Because the awareness of a person and his point of view on his own way of life is much more important than any skills of sorting, storage or anything else. The order depends on personal values ​​that determine the way a person wants to live.

Most people would rather live in a clean and tidy space. Anyone who has managed to clean up at least once will want everything to stay that way - cleaned up. But many do not believe that this is possible. People try a variety of approaches to cleaning and find that things soon return to "normal". However, I am quite convinced that everyone is capable of keeping their space in order.

To do this, it is essential to take a close look at your cleaning habits and attitudes. This may seem like a lot of work, but don't worry! By the time you have finished reading this book, you will be ready and eager to do this work. People often say to me: I am a person who is not organized by nature. I can not do it" or " I have no time»; but disorder and slovenliness are not hereditary qualities, and they are not connected with lack of time. They are much more strongly associated with the accumulation of misconceptions about cleaning, such as: it is best to deal with one room at a time; or it is best to clean a little every day; or the storage must match the streaming plan.

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