Konmari Your Life – Declutter Beyond Your Stuff

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Konmari method of organizing and de-cluttering has gain such a momentum that it is becoming a common household name 🙂 Marie Kondo, in her book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, describes an organizing method that helps people declutter their house. The idea is that you sort your things by categories (clothes, books, etc.) and go through each item one by one in order to decide if it brings you joy. If it does, you get to keep it, but if it does not, you get rid of it.

And I started thinking, why stop there? Let’s apply this concept to other areas of our lives. Because let’s face it, it’s not just our house that needs decluttering.

I’m sharing four areas of your life that you should Konmari away.

1. Konmari Your Social Media

The first place to declutter your life is to look at your social media. Is it full on negativity? Do you find yourself happy and motivated when you scroll through your Facebook or Instagram feed? Or do the posts make you feel unhappy, inadequate, or sad?

There are two types of content on your feed: those of your friends or people you know, and th

Influencers and Business Pages

ose of influencers or business pages.

The Konmari method is much easier on this category. Take a look at the influencers you follow and ask yourself: does this person’s posts bring me joy? Do you find the content posted by a particular news page helpful?  If not, simply unfollow/unlike their accounts. There really is not reason to clutter your feed with posts from people you don’t know about topics you don’t care about.

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Friends

Now, how can you Konmari your friends? First, ask yourself: are they really my friends? Do I interact with them on a personal level? Or do they better fit into a category of ‘people I know’. This distinction will make it easier to determine which account you can unfollow.

Now, the hardest part is people you know. Most of us have people on our social media who post things that trigger some negative emotions. It might be anger because you don’t agree with their opinion. It might be posts that annoyance because they keep posting so much that it seems like your feed is filled with their posts. And it might be sadness because they are posting about their success when you are struggling really hard in the same area of your life (whether financial, health, or even fertility).

In some situations you might decide that ‘unfriending’ on ‘unfollowing’ is the way to go. However, it that is not a solution, take some steps to see fewer posts from those people. You can ‘unfollow them’ but still be connected as ‘friends’ on social medial. You can also ‘snooze’ them so you don’t see their post for a while or even ‘hide all posts’ from that person. That way you will have to go to their accounts to see their posts as they will not show on your feed.

The point is to be intentional about people you interact with. Take steps to declutter your life by cleaning up your social media.

2. Konmari Your Activities

You can Konmari you life with the greatest impact by decluttering the activities. This is also the hardest one. First, let me explain what I mean by activities by dividing them up into two categories:

Everyday Tasks and Responsibilities

These would be things like cooking, homework help, cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, driving kids to school, or work lunch prep. Anything that you do on a consistent basis.

Now you might ask yourself, how am I suppose to declutter cleaning? Are you suggesting I live in a dirty house? No, I’m definitely not suggesting that. What I am suggesting is to take a look at all your tasks and everyday responsibilities and determine which ones you enjoy doing and which ones you really dislike. And then see if you can make some changes to the way you perform that task (make it more efficient) or if you can delegate that task to someone else (family member or even pay someone else to do it for you).

For example, if you do no like cooking, you can opt for healthy options from local restaurants, home delivery meals, asking your spouse to take over, or doubling your recipes and freezing one so you don’t have to cook as often. There are definitely options that you can explore.

RELATED: Meal Prepping Hacks for Working Moms

Additional Tasks and Volunteer Work

Those would be things that you volunteer for such as events at your child’s school, community events, hosting large family gatherings, or helping friends with projects.

This is not so say that you should not volunteer. But as women, we tend to stretch ourselves thin by agreeing to everything. And often agreeing to things that we really don’t want to do but decide to volunteer because it is the right thing to do. But is it really the right thing to do if you don’t enjoy it and it makes you say no to things that you actually want to do?

Take some time to evaluate these types of activities and decide which ones bring you joy. You can make the biggest impact by doing things that you enjoy because you will put your heart into it.

3.  Konmari Subscriptions

Another area that you should tackle as you Konmari your life is subscriptions. We probably all have at least few of them. Think about subscriptions to services like Netflix or Hulu. Or subscriptions to products like clothes/beauty boxes or magazines. We also have subscriptions to different websites or companies that communicate with us via email.

These are all great: if you actually use them! But if you are keeping your subscriptions out of comfort, then they are simply cluttering your life. Not to mention you end up wasting a lot of money on services and products that you don’t use or like.

Take an inventory of all the subscriptions that you have and evaluate them individually. Do they bring you joy? Are they provide you with any value? Do you actually read the e-mails you receive as the result of your subscriptions? Cancel any subscriptions that did not make the cut.

About a year ago, I made a decision to cut our cable and get Hulu instead. Why? Because when we have evaluated what we actually watched, we realized that it was one or two shows. And it did not make sense for us to keep it. I also cancelled my subscriptions to the last two magazines that I had. Again, when I stopped to think when was the last time I actually read that magazine, the answer was 8 months ago. All these magazines were doing was cluttering my space and life.

4. Social Events Konmari Style

The last area of your life that can use some decluttering is social events. If you ever attend events that you don’t enjoy, you need to re-evaluate.

So write down all the social events that you attend and go through he list one by one to decide if they bring value to your life. These could be PTO meetings, monthly alumni meetings from your college, playdates, or even weekly family dinners. Are the beneficial to you? Are they making you happy? Do you look forward to them?

Whatever those social events are, there is no reason to sit through them on regular basis if they are not beneficial, bring you value, or making you happy. If you cannot completely eliminated them (I would guess weekly family dinners would probably be one of those) you should at least downsize. Because sometimes the stressful part is not the social even itself, as much as it is it’s frequency.

Maybe having playdates twice a week is too much for but having them once a week would work much better for you. Or maybe the family dinners won’t be so stressful if you do it twice a month.

Conclusion

The idea behind using Konmari to declutter your life is the same as for any decluttering of physical stuff. Think of it as having 5 pairs of jeans instead of 20 🙂 Or getting rid of all the kitchen gadgets tha you have not used in the past year.

So evaluate those four areas of your life declutter your activities, tasks, and responsibilities by either eliminating them, delegating them, or making changes to make the process more efficient.

Let me know in your comments what area of your life needs Konmari the most!