I filled two 60-gallon trash bags with miscellaneous garbage: shirts with ink stains on the pockets, old clippings, appliance warranties, credit card statements. I found myself pondering whether she would go through one a day if she brushed her teeth too hard, or if perhaps she used a different brush for each tooth.” Kondo muses: “It’s interesting how the human mind tries to make sense even out of the nonsensical. The record, she says, was the client who stockpiled 20,000 cotton swabs. Kondo writes of the client with 60 toothbrushes and of another with 80 rolls of toilet paper. In a section titled “Astounding Stockpiles I Have Seen,” Ms. And I smugly noted that my hoarding habits could be worse. I threw lone gloves out with near drunken abandon. Giddy, I twirled ribbons into circles and nestled them in a drawer with a stack of tissue paper, notecards and rolls of Scotch tape. “Where is all the food?” my daughter wailed. (Like Staples and Best Buy in New York City, the Salvation Army is a recycling drop-off location for electronics.) Two-thirds of my fridge - jam dating to 2010, undated tubes of tomato paste - ended up in the trash. After three days, I had given four bags of clothing and two bags of shoes to the Salvation Army, along with two dead computers. Mine were obviously having a terrible time, torqued and twisted like coach passengers on an overcrowded flight to Europe. Folding is a key strategy of modular systems that have evolved because of limited living space.” Folding is deep and pervasive in Japanese culture.

“There is also the furoshiki, which is basically a square of flat cloth used daily to wrap packages. “Think of the kimono, and the tradition of folding,” he said. Koren, who spent 10 years there and is the author of “Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers.” In Japan, a hyper-awareness, even reverence, for objects is a rational response to geography, said Mr. Such anthropomorphism and nondualism, so familiar in Japanese culture, as Leonard Koren, a design theorist who has written extensively on Japanese aesthetics, told me recently, was an epiphany to this Westerner. Hang up anything that looks happier hung up, and arrange like with like, working from left to right, with dark, heavy clothing on the left: “Clothes, like people, can relax more freely when in the company of others who are very similar in type, and therefore organizing them by category helps them feel more comfortable and secure.” She proposes a similarly agreeable technique for hanging clothing. The final step? Take the items you wish to get rid of and say goodbye with a ceremony.“When we take our clothes in our hands and fold them neatly,” she writes, “we are, I believe, transmitting energy, which has a positive effect on our clothes.”

If not, dispose of it.' It's that simple. To do so: Hold each item and ask yourself whether or not it sparks joy. Instead of focusing on what you want to throw away-which, of course, naturally brings unhappiness-Marie encourages readers to focus, instead, on the things we want to keep. Key: Choose What You Want to Keep, Not What You Want To Toss. Why save a spot for hair ties in your bathroom and your bedroom when you could neatly store all of them in one location? By organizing category by category, you'll keep all items of the same type neatly in the same place. For example, if you tidy your bedroom first, then go to the bathroom, you might end up creating two separate spots for the same type of items. By organizing room by room, discarding, and then putting everything back, you aren't doing yourselves any favors.

Unless you've followed the KonMari Method to tidy your house, you might otherwise assume the best bet is to tackle one room at a time, but Marie says that's a hard no.

Tidy up art