I always liked Anthony Bourdain's take on "Meez" from Kitchen Confidential:
Mise-en-place is the religion of all good line cooks. Do not fuck with a line cook’s ‘meez’ — meaning his setup, his carefully arranged supplies of sea salt, rough-cracked pepper, softened butter, cooking oil, wine, backups, and so on. As a cook, your station, and its condition, its state of readiness, is an extension of your nervous system... The universe is in order when your station is set up the way you like it: you know where to find everything with your eyes closed, everything you need during the course of the shift is at the ready at arm’s reach, your defenses are deployed. If you let your mise-en-place run down, get dirty and disorganized, you’ll quickly find yourself spinning in place and calling for backup. I worked with a chef who used to step behind the line to a dirty cook’s station in the middle of a rush to explain why the offending cook was falling behind. He’d press his palm down on the cutting board, which was littered with peppercorns, spattered sauce, bits of parsley, bread crumbs and the usual flotsam and jetsam that accumulates quickly on a station if not constantly wiped away with a moist side towel. “You see this?” he’d inquire, raising his palm so that the cook could see the bits of dirt and scraps sticking to his chef’s palm. “That’s what the inside of your head looks like now.”
I imagine most developers will recognize the obvious parallels with our craft.
There is a book called "Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind" that discusses this philosophy further and how someone can integrate these principles into their work life. It was a pretty interesting read.
Knolling is a sort of counterpoint to eliminating clutter; when you can't get rid of it, try to make it adhere to some system.
While I generally find it less desirable than having storage for items, as a habit it's very effective at maintaining order. Once the compulsion develops, the trend is strongly toward order rather than disorder.
Totally OT but: Of course I can see this chef's point but why does it look like they are psychopaths on loose in the kitchen ? When I talk with chefs or people running cuisine they are very aggressive and ready to burst out at any thing with a confrontational and "I am always right" attitude.
I worked as a chef for 8 years. I might have some ideas about this.
In the below, I will use the pronoun 'he' purely for convenience and may swear a bit.
When you're in a brigade, you're called 'a chef', but there's only one chef called 'the chef' and you are cooking his food. If he had 30 arms he'd do it himself, but he doesn't, so he employs 14 wastrels to make up the deficit. Make no mistake: you are an extension of the chef's body, your hands are his hands, your garnishes are his garnishes, and your mistakes are his mistakes. (Indeed, in the trade, you don't say 'I'm going to work at Noma' , you say 'I'm going to cook for Redzepi').
The chef probably sacrificed the best years of his life toiling on his feet for 70 hours a week, saving, learning, forming opinions and dreaming of the day he can cook his own food. Most people cave in, change careers or hit 50 and can't keep up any more. Chef is balancing years of agony and reverie on the improbable fulcrum of his restaurant, which he genuinely believes could come toppling down if his peppers aren't julienned properly. Except he doesn't julienne them. You do.
'What the fuck is this?'
'Peppers, chef.'
'Don't fuck with me. I wrote the menu. Read it. READ IT!'
'Raw scallop and peppers julienne.'
'Well, these are diced, we're behind on checks already, there's no peppers left and now the most important critic in the country is going to think I don't know what a fucking julienne looks like. Get in the prep kitchen and get Robbie on the pass. Fuck sake.'
'Yes, chef.'
What's the first thing that commis is going to do when he gets home, exhausted and aching? Crack open his Larousse and learn his damn cuts.
Chef made it through one of the most brutal industries in the world and is wagering his life savings on the bullshit odds of running a kitchen not for fame, not for money, but for the all-consuming joy of seeing his food, on his plates, being served to his customers. It is pure, beautiful, passionate narcissism. And fuck me if he won't let it all slide way because your sorry ass never learned how to properly julienne a fucking pepper.
Add that to the sincere hell of standing tooth by jowl with your sweaty, tired comrades in immense heat and pressure serving your last grilled octopus at 11:15pm, adrenaline dumping as you put your section back together to get ready for the breakfast shift in 7 hours and, yes, things get a little tense.
Not all kitchens are like this, but it is the default setting in those environments and preventing it takes conscious effort.
Do you think it also applies to smaller brigade ? (as in 1 chef and 1 commis) ? I have seen and heard some commis displaying that behavior when talking with new apprentices in a school context. It seemed to come with the job even when they hadn't "skin in the game" (yet?).
The alloy of anger and passion has become a bit of a trope in cuisine so I think some people just ham it up. There's also a trickle down effect (if an assistant does something wrong and passes it to a commis chef who doesn't notice who passes it to his chef-de-partie who doesn't notice who plates it for chef who notices, the cdp gets chewed out, who gives it raw to the commis, who kicks the assistant's ass).
I did work in a 1-1 environment for a little while with a chef who went into retirement and came back out to do a lovely little diner with food way better than it needed to be. It was probably the best cooking experience of my short career and nary a heated word was exchanged. The chef was a good guy, but it definitely helped that it was just two of us.
I don't think it's healthy, but I can see how rage can occur in the mania of a busy kitchen that takes itself seriously. In a school, however, I can't see how that helps. Maybe the commis thought that accepting harsh criticism was part of the lesson; maybe he's just parroting the way his superiors treated him; maybe he's just a douche.
Time pressure, mostly. Kitchens are full of people working exactly as quickly as they possibly can while working "sustainably" (in a very weak sense of the word.) It's the efficiency doctrine at its worst: any cook that's not producing at 100% is "spare capacity" that could be used to serve more customers, faster. Restaurants are planned, booked, and staffed so that the cooks will always need to be working at 100% to have even adequate service levels.
On the other hand, some kinds of restaurants—diners, for one—are operated with a different mindset, and don't have much connection to the larger "restaurant industry." Cooks that aren't forced to operate at 100% all the time are genuinely friendly and relaxed people (and also have enough time to both take your order themselves and then make whatever customizations you might ask for.)
Nature of the venture, probably. The head chef has the most skin in the game, if not all, so with great responsibility comes great power. Also the need to get things done quickly and decisively probably demands a more military structure, with care and feedback coming in the weekly catchup meal.
Reading the entire Bourdain book gives a lot of insight.
The restaurant business is high-pressure and low-margin. It's a cutthroat world and if you're not aggressive enough you'll get eaten alive...literally.
My impression going off what I've seen and read of the culture is you're right. But I've imagine a lot of us have worked with the dev or manager who seems like he'd fit right in that environment. And if you were to make a reality show about software development, I imagine that guy would be getting a lot of air time.
Going through Marie Kondo's process was amazing for me. I've tried so many times to get organized, and her book seemed to address the exact reasons why each of my previous attempts has failed. And it really, really, worked.
I would encourage anyone trying it to actually give the stupid sounding stuff in it a try. For instance, I found with items I was having a hard time letting go of, verbally thanking them for their service and saying goodbye, as she suggests, actually worked. Somehow it seems to satisfy whatever part of your brain is reticent to part with a particular thing.
Or—if your momento is a physical picture (e.g. an old photo album, or a scrapbook, or childhood drawings left on the fridge for years)—try digitizing it.
That's a really great idea for kids drawings. I'll always keep a select few special ones, but any parent knows you'll end up with an art gallery if you keep everything. Making a digital art gallery of that stuff is a really good approach to letting go.
I wouldn't go that far. No digital gallery will keep the physicality of your kids' art and you'll really cherish that part when they're older, and throwing away what your kid makes is really going to squash any interest in making more of it.
“People ask me about the positive side of clutter and I say, ‘There isn’t any positive side.’”
This is incorrect, of course.
I dislike clutter and I personally maintain a relatively clutter-free existence but of course there is a trade-off to be made between short term expediency and lack of clutter.
Understanding this trade-off has been helpful to me - especially in designing and acquiring living spaces.
Here is an example:
My current office space requires two rooms. However, I went out of my way to find a suite with three rooms - the third of which was not, and continues to not, be necessary. What this "buffer space" allows me to do is stage, or cache, incoming items and/or projects while allowing me to make full (clutter-free) use of the necessary two rooms without interruption.
Running my office without a third room would be like running a CPU without a cache - it is perfectly workable and there's no reason it can't be done - but it requires immediate, real-time interruption of work to maintain the empty (clutter-free) pipeline (really stretching the CPU analogy here, but you get the idea).
If an item has a reason to be sitting there; and then you actually do engage with it the way you were planning to; and then when the reason goes away, the item goes away; then it's not clutter. It's just prep.
"Clutter" is the result of a broken mental model of physical "cache eviction": it's stuff that you have in the way of projects you're doing now, even though the stuff that's in the way is for a project you're planning for later (and might never even get to.) It's stuff whose presence slows down your life, rather than speeding it up, when measured over the long term.
Reason can come and go. That's the problematic part with clutter. Something may have lost it's purpose for now, but someday in the future a new purpose can appear and then it's not clutter anymore. Instead of comparing that 3rd room with a cache, I would call it an archive, a bank for items or just your "uselater"-room, where you collect items similar to how people collect bookmarks which they plan to readlater.
The relevant part is that clutter should not stand in your way, hinder you in your progress. Thus it must stored away and trimmed down from time to time if space is raching it's capacity. But besides that? If you have the space, who cares. As long as it's out of the way it's not a hindrace.
I did something similar on a smaller scale -- on my jamie hyneman-style wall of boxes, I added a few "inbox" boxes. When cleaning up, if I don't know where something goes, it goes into an inbox. Turning this mental roadblock into a non-decision makes cleaning up much, much faster. And because you only have a small number of inboxes, finding a "where did I put that?" item is quick.
I used to be a messy sort, and my flatmate got a bit sick of it. We had two fairly deep drawers in the kitchen that we didn’t use for anything else, so they each became our “where stuff is” drawer.
I had the right to put any of his loose possessions in his drawer, and he mine. So, of course, that’s where ALL of my stuff ended up. His was mostly empty. :-/ Either way, I knew where my stuff was!
This is a wonderful analogy and a great idea. We just did a bunch of cleaning and organizing for a holiday party. A place for everything and everything in it's place kind of thing. I've never thought of dedicated space to serve as a cache to prevent the clutter from affecting the rest of the space.
I think you are confusing what the article means by clutter. You don't keep things in the third room that are unnecessary. It is just that spending time organizing them in a system that would appear visually de-cluttered would be a waste of time. Your third room might eventually need to be cleaned out once your cache gets full of things that, for one reason or another, you don't need anymore.
Every couple months I stop keeping my home spic and span and simply let it go: newspapers, empty cans, Amazon boxes, sunflower seed shells, unwanted mail, etc. all over the place, clothes strewn everywhere, cords/connectors/cables/chargers both plugged and unplugged festooning every available surface.... I like living amongst the chaos for about a week, before it starts to annoy me and I spiff the place up. Both the fall into disorder and its anti-entropic counterpart are soothing, in their place.
You can think of clutter as a ratio of stuff to space... adding space is one way to deal with it. Just not one that’s practical for most people without major life upheavals like moving house.
Throwing stuff out is hard to do if you are poor or were raised poor. Everything you save now does not have to be bought later. There is a potential use for anything and everything, so you might as well keep it. Granted, at a certain point the cost of the storage facility exceeds the amount saved, but the mindset is still there.
Even now, as well off as I am, I tend to collect things (and by extension, clutter) because I can see the potential need for something in the future. I've been trying to overcome this mindset and slim down my possessions to the things I need and the few sentimental items I have, but it's not easy at all. If someone else came into my house and started trying to clean up, I'd probably lose my mind (admittedly for a few unrelated reasons as well, but largely because of this mindset)
Might be worth watching an episode of the show to better understand what Kondo's process is. She doesn't clean or work some one off magic. She teaches 5(?) core lessons to help maintain tidiness. She doesn't excavate their piles of stuff for them.
As an obsessive organizer at home, almost to the point of my family's dismay until they cackle at how easy it is to find things now, I feel like I need to binge watch the whole series and hone my skills.
As well as the initial discard phase, organizational part (loads of plastic boxes, label printer connected to a computer), the piece most people don't mention is how to keep it tidy afterwards. In my experience the key to this is making it absurdly easy to put something away - this means easy to access storage, clear, easy to read labels and perhaps most importantly, plenty of capacity to grow. It's no good putting all your widgets in a box that's only just big enough to hold them. Later on when you acquire more, there will be nowhere to put them so you'll likely leave them out or dump them in a different box. I've used this approach in my garage, my home-office and our medicine cupboard (closet) to great effect. Next up is the pantry..
I've always dismissed her stuff as one of those pseudo-spiritual neo-philosophies that mix a bit of Eastern wisdom with platitudes and sell it to affluent Westerners in search of meaning.
Talk about Baader-Meinhof effect: Just yesterday I spontaneously picked up the book on Kindle, and I'm blown away.
It is so much more. Yes, there is a lot of marketing behind it, of course. But I also sense an honesty in it that has already semi-convinced me to actually do it!
And just a second ago I peeked into the Google Talk video and saw that she doesn't speak English? If this was a marketing stunt, she would have learned English (or the publisher would have found another figurehead).
I really liked how the book comes with no strings attached. Everything you need is in that one small book. No subscription, no rich dad poor dad XVII: buy a cheap house and flip it trash. Just one book to help simplify life.
Might come across as a Kondo shill, the type of which I have called out elsewhere on HN, so I accept any berating due. I do recommend getting it from a local Library, watching the show, or just find a recap online!
You should do it. It can sometimes be pain in the ass and it takes a long time. It took us several months to finish, during the process your house will be a huge mess. We donated bags and bags and bags of stuff. It is truly amazing how much crap you can unthinkingly acquire. In the end it was totally worth the trouble.
Get the book and make sure to give it a full read-through before starting. The order you do things matters quite a bit.
Odd that the article includes some weird non-Kondo advice about "don't touch it", probably contrary even, given that her approach is very intimate/fluffy.
I guess the overall idea is to think more objectively about something's value, using your own sense of "joy" as a proxy for that value function.
For a while now I've been thinking about writing a "Marie Kondo's approach distilled for engineers"...
From my reading it seems to be his objection to her method and whether "joy" is the right metric/method for determining if something stays.
While I know, from experience, what he says is true I still think that Kondo has a better system for most people. I'll do my best to explain what I've gotten from the show.
I think Kondo's approach is actually very simple and focused on a single thing: Keep your home tidy. Her job in a sense is convince people with a problem to take steps to solve that problem which often involves getting rid of things, but not always. It's actually building habits to keep things organized and realizing when something is no longer important and therefore doesn't justify the work needed to keep it in it's proper place.
She starts with clothing, which often is plentiful and easily to identify some vague person definition of "joy." Pure utilitarianism isn't right for everyone and this allows the person to determine that on their own. You can see this in the show as people go through their clothes it's hard at first but it provides a bunch of opportunities to find obvious "yes"/"no"s to the joy question. The genius I find is that she starts with clothing and leaves sentimental items for the end after you've gained experience determining what "joy" really means to you. As well as the act of "thanking" items which once practiced you can do at the harder steps more naturally and not feel guilty about getting rid of things which are meaningful, but not needed anymore.
Touching the items provides some safety by saving things which you might actually get rid of, but just can't. It makes the process much less risky. Later on, by continuing to use the method occasionally, you might realize that this actually doesn't bring you joy anymore, but now you're able to accept this and remove the item.
We're trying to be happy here, not perfect. The genius of the method is how many points of it are designed to gradually gain experience to keeping things tidy while minimizing the overwhelming feelings and riskiness that one can feel when getting rid of things. Which makes for a system that even those with the least willpower and discipline can gain something from.
My partner made me watch a few episodes on Netflix. I was pretty sceptical about finding something innovative in the show but thought her approach made a lot of sense for physical things.
I was wondering about translating it into organising my digital life. What's equivalent to step 1: Clothes? Probably video downloads or other large media in the Downloads folder that take up a lot of space and carry little emotional attachment.
It gets harder to figure out how to organize important documents, though. But they should probably be united in one "heap" first, too, maybe with annotations.
Luckily we don't need to let go of many things in the digital realm, so organising things with emotional attachment is a lot easier.
> I was wondering about translating it into organising my digital life.
Yeah, I've gone down this path too. The thing about digital is storage is cheap and getting cheaper all the time. There is very little cost to having a lot of "clutter" in your digital world. It doesn't take up physical space and it doesn't really occupy mental space either. Arguably the cost of trying to de-clutter it is higher than the cost of accidentally deleting something you might want in the future, which is why I'm pretty sure I have never bothered. Put another way, decluttering your digital space is a potentially NPV negative affair--the costs of accidental deletion and time spent decluttering outweigh the gains made by having a "decluttered" digital space.
The only thing in the digital world I think I could justify de-cluttering is my photos. I take a lot of duplicate pictures with slightly different variations in lighting and focus. Having 10 slightly different versions of the same scene is clutter -- especially when 8 of them feature people with their eyes closed, not smiling, not looking at the camera, not in focus, etc.
The rest of my digital stuff isn't like that--there is no 10 slightly different copies of the same paper I wrote in college 10 years ago. Just one. Why bother deleting it? An e-book I read once three years ago and will probably never read again only takes up 30 megs of space when pulled down from the cloud. It doesn't occupy physical space in my life. Why delete it? It costs more of my time & energy to nuke it than just let it be.
Well said. One important part of that for me is to resist any attempt to impose a structure on those "piles" of digital docs. For the things you mention, I'm exclusively going to access them in the future — if I ever do — via search (or perhaps in some late-night nostalgic browsing) so I don't need to organize the paper I wrote in college into a complicated folder hierarchy of College > Biology > 2nd semester. Just throw it on the pile. Embrace its pileness. If archiving a doc in this way takes any thought whatsoever, I'm going to be much less likely to do the archiving in the first place and it's going to end up causing clutter in some place where it does negatively affect me.
I've found a lot of improvement in my digital productivity by following plaintext productivity's [1] for organizing my files. But, I also pretty much put everything older than a year that I'm not working on into a giant archive bin that I attempt to organize in no shape or fashion. There's twenty odd years of files going all the way back to middle school in there and trying to make any sense of it would be a waste.
Well, /I/ think her approach is very marketing-oriented. For example she asks whether an item sparks "joy". Joy is kind transient, very subjective, etc. But it fits within her "shtick" and it works. For me, I'd ask whether it provides utility, but that sounds very boring and isn't a term which would fit well in marketing.
I.e., people don't intuitively understand what "good" or "useful" is—those terms are mired in tons of prescriptive statements made by ideologues that get you confused. But "awesome" (or in this case, "joyous") isn't really a property people ever insist that something has for political reasons. It's something you've probably only ever heard as a descriptive word referring to things that are genuinely "awesome"/"joyous", and so your intuition on what is "awesome"/"joyous" is likely much more solid and easier to "hear."
I would also argue that "joy" is a pretty useful word in the sense that asking about a thing's utility conjures images of sterile pro/con lists of a thing's immediate usefulness right now; while "joy" might be an acute nostalgia, or the sense of determined hypomania brought on by a clearly-imagined-and-still-enthusiastic plan of what you will be doing with the thing a year from now.
That's an interesting take and maybe that's what she's doing. Plus, I think she is making this idea accessible to people by putting it in very simple terms -despite my misgivings.
Interestingly, another commenter mentioned that the actual word in Japanese isn't joy or sparking joy, but rather heart throb [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18865829] which to me would eliminate quite a few more useful things that aren't as emotion inducing.
All this reminds me of someone I worked with who said she liked Kondo's advice and took it to throw out anything she hadn't worn in six months. Which seemed like a wasteful way of thinking. [i.e. don't like something now nor for the past six months, toss; then month later, aha, I need that thing, lemme buy a new one. And what about Winter clothes or Summer clothes, etc.]
This seems like pointless cynicism by way of semantics.
I think utility - as a term - carries more baggage in this context. People tend to easily come up with reasons they could hold on to something. Most things could be useful for one reason or another, but the problem is that, realistically, you've vanishingly likely to actually do something with it.
Joy might describe a situation where the utility meets its need, where it's value to you is especially high.
In other words, I think 'joy' was a deliberate and informed choice.
Finally, I'm not at all sold on 'utility' having poor marketability. Maybe not great, but it speaks well to the value-optimizer and many people that are interested in self-help sorts of subjects.
I feel the same way about "spark joy" or the more direct translation of "heart throbbing". I rarely assign that emotion to tools or non-sentimental items which I need in daily life. Some things you use to perform quotidian or even tiresome activities like a rake, a snow shovel, laundry detergent, clothes for going to work, etc.
Do sentimental items provide utility? Only if you define utility in a way that includes "owning this makes me feel particularly good even though the object itself isn't otherwise functional." Which sounds a lot like "sparks joy."
So here is where I'm coming from. Does a hammer provide "joy", maybe I haven't used a sander in over a year. I don't miss it; it doesn't provide joy, but it is very useful when needed. Do photographs and souvenirs and personal items provide utility, I'd say so.
Her second book [1] covers this, with a few amusing anecdotes:
Take, for example, my vacuum cleaner. I got rid of it because it was an outdated model, and instead diligently wiped the floor with paper towels and rags. But in the end it simply took too much time, and I had to buy a new vacuum.
And then there was my screwdriver. After throwing it away, I tried using a ruler to tighten a loose screw, but it snapped down the middle. This almost reduced me to tears as it was one I really liked.
All these incidents stemmed from youthful inexperience and thoughtlessness. They demonstrated that I had not yet honed my ability to discern what brings me joy. Deceived by their plainness, I failed to realize that I actually liked them. I had assumed that if something brought me joy, I would feel a thrill of excitement that made my heart beat faster. Now I see things differently.
Feelings of fascination, excitement, or attraction are not the only indications of joy. A simple design that puts you at ease, a high degree of functionality that makes life simpler, a sense of rightness, or the recognition that a possession is useful in our daily lives—these, too, indicate joy.
This reads like a hotfix to patch up a bug in her reasoning. Maybe it is more coherent in the japanese original, but pushing joy onto something which has a purely practical reason seems wrong for me.
Actually I own several hammers which spark joy: a small mini-hammer which fits perfectly in my hand. A large sledge hammer which is entirely too heavy to be practical, but feels like wielding Mjolnir when I use it to break brake discs loose.
The real gray area is when you have some poor quality tools which you do need and use, and you can't yet afford to replace them with ones that do spark joy.
Yes, that dingy 'harbor freight zone' of joyless, but functional tools that would cost more than their utility to replace. I have found many tools I did not expect, can be rented at local stores. Its not like I need that brake tool every week to keep my home nice.
Living out of the sticks, the tool that brings me joy is the one that's already lying around in my workshop, and that I don't need to drive into town to buy on that once-in-a-year occasion that I need it.
Personally I try and buy tools second hand, as they are typically cheaper and of better quality than the new tools sold in hardware stores. And they can be resold for about the same I paid for them, making them free to own.
Apart, that is, from their alleged intrusion on my personal joy from cluttering my workshop. Which is rubbish - workshops should be exempt from this joyful thinking, they are places where you want to find that useful piece of scrap material lying somewhere - anywhere - when you need it.
I think what Kondo would say in this situation is that having those things sparks joy for you. You should keep the scrap materials, but try to organize them in ways that allow you to quickly see everything you have so you don't forget about or lose things.
One of her rules seems to be "Try to organize your objects in a way that each one can be viewed without having to move another". Pile is worse than a Box is worse than trays/drawers. Organizing your scraps by category and size would likely make them provide more utility to you?
But as someone with a cluttered workshop trying to figure out a good organization scheme, I may be thinking too much about this. Anyone have a quote from her about workshop/scrap materials?
It feels like you're arguing against something that isn't really what Kondo is offering, and she specifically discusses in reference to vacuum cleaners and screwdrivers (tools you don't need every day, but the frustration of not having is an "anti joy"). The joy concept isn't so rigid as delight in that moment, though it can be misconstrued that way.
What I think she would say about a workshop is that a well-organized (tidy) space, where everything has its place, so you know where to go when you need something, and where it goes when you have finished using it, is going to make you a happier person than having to dig through a toolbox/drawer/scrap pile to find the right tool or piece of wood.
In my experience, workshops are not devoid of joy, unless you work only on things you don't enjoy or find pride in, which seems unfortunate. My workshop memories are of my granddad making wood products of all sorts, my dad working on the car and various household projects, and my brother creating toys of various types (e.g. making our own cornhole set). The frustrations in the workshop were typically of not being able to find something I knew was there, but perhaps that isn't what you are after or expressing here.
Having a well-stocked toolbox gives me joy, because I like having the right tool available whenever I need one. There's no need to go through and evaluate every single item in there; the toolbox takes up the same amount of space whether it's full or nearly empty.
I would have said "utility" if I were writing it, but if "joy" reaches a greater number of readers, then it's probably the better choice. And you knew what she meant, anyway.
The problem is that there's a little more nuance than just "utility". As an example, take clothing. I don't think that anyone would argue that a single t-shirt didn't have utility. After all, I can wear it. However, I have several t-shirts from conferences or conventions that I don't ever wear. So while they have utility in theory, I'm not utilizing them in practice.
Yeah, I thought of that but I think you could take all those Ts and then the first one and second one would have utility (one while the other is in the wash) then each subsequent one would have less marginal utility, till some cut-off.
Reducing a methodology to a single phrase is bound to be... reductive. But if memory serves there was an example her book where at one point she did, in fact, get rid of her hammer and either used another object or borrowed one when needed.
Speaking for myself: I have more objects that have utility than I have space to put things away, so there's got to be more to it than that if I want to avoid clutter.
She did, but later bought another hammer (I think it was a screwdriver actually) because she realised that it did in fact spark joy by virtue of being useful.
I think part of the problem is with the translation. The original Japanese word used is ときめき (tokimeki), which literally means "heart throbbing". The actual thing you want to keep doesn't have to provide a joyful experience.
My parents have a basement overflowing of stuff that is full of potential utility, so I think that the joy aspect is to provide a different view point so people let go more easily.
True. But the same qualifier could be used for joy. Things could have potential for providing joy, they're just not providing joy right now.
I guess, if I had "too many things", I'd probably set some parameters and get rid of unnecessary duplicates, broken things unlikely to get repaired and things unlikely to be used in any significant capacity in the foreseeable future -knowing that one may possibly have to reacquire something one disposed of.
Potential utility is different to actual utility though. Is that stuff actually useful to them right now? Or in general? If the answer is no then it has zero utility.
Can't these two coincide? As you mention, joy is subjective. For you, joy can be utility, and for someone else that can be something else.
I think it's reasonable to suggest the rule for what things you should keep should be based around what you find good. If you mean utility in the John Stuart Mill way, then joy is the same thing but probably easier for the average person to grasp immediately.
I think the way to think about it is you need to change your relationship with those things that don't spark puppy-dog like joy from but you need. For example, I don't get particularly excited about all the damn weird DVI cables I have stashed in my drawer but I've realized if I toss them, I'll need them in a hurry and it really sucks having to buy new ones.
> For example, I don't get particularly excited about all the damn weird DVI cables I have stashed in my drawer but I've realized if I toss them, I'll need them in a hurry and it really sucks having to buy new ones.
I think this is the exact thing that she's trying to help people overcome. It's the thought process that a lot of hoarders have. "Well, I don't need it now, but I will in the future."
I think it's important to ask yourself if you will actually need those DVI cables. How often do you replace them? When was the last time you looked for one? How much time do they take to find?
If you haven't needed a new DVI cable in 6 months, a year--what makes you think you'll need one in the next year? These are important distinctions to make.
For me, I find that my whole cart of misc tech pieces and cables are rarely used, to the point where just getting rid of almost all of it is a huge relief. If I need another X cable, the mental tax of storing, sorting, and finding that cable is not worth the $10 it would cost to just order a new one when the need arises--if it ever does.
It's very easy to rationalize the the prepper mindset of an item's utility. Yes, I MAY need this in the future... but if I don't, I'm just going to continue collecting things that may never serve any purpose.
I find her approach to "sparking joy" to be a lot more than just marketing. She's trying to hone in on what we really should keep vs what we think we should keep. I have a stash of plain white t-shirts that I can justify scenarios for all day--but when did I actually need more than one in the last year? Maybe it would make sense for me to keep one on hand, but clear the others, because they neither bring me joy nor have a utilitarian purpose that's actually being enacted.
Let me rephrase because I kinda made it sound like I'm a cable hoarder (I'm not.... I swear!! I'm just a cable connoisseur, thats all! hah!)
I need a DVI cable because I have a headless DVR computer that once every blue moon needs a head. I've tossed that DVI cable once before because it didn't spark joy (none of my cables do) and lo and behold I needed to give my headless box a head or my wife won't be able to watch her shows.
I had to run way out of my way to purchase a new one. It pissed me off and from then on, the new replacement sparks joy because I know there will come a time where I need it again and having on hand makes me happy.
That those RCA to headphones jacks I don't use? Toss 'em. The 10 different power cords and three dozen HDMI cables of varying length? Toss them on the curb! But that DVI cable? I need that, damn it! I learned that that one DVI cable does spark joy because it is right there waiting for that one day when I actually need to head-ify my headless box.
My current big problem is my main hobby is electronics and tinkering with meatspace stuff, which is a hobby that can easily encourage hanging on to every motor, weird wire and other bits and bobs "just in case". Every new purchase comes in bulk so you wind up with a three hundred pack of shrink wrap tubing, or 1000 assorted resistors. I'm still not entirely sure how to deal with that. Especially since life has interfered in a good way I've had to temporarily shelf the hobby for a few years.
One thing that I've done in these situations is keep all the accessories with the thing that needs it. For example, I have a small box attached to the inside of my home theater PC. Inside the box are various cables I might need for repair, small screw driver set, etc. Sure, I could probably use those cables or that screw driver set elsewhere, but in my mind they just become part of the PC, rather than objects in some drawer I need to go find.
It's calculated to resonate with her target audience, sure. It seems silly to dismiss that as cynical marketing. As long as you're not attempting to harm people or get them to act against their interests, choosing words that appeal to your audience is just good design.
I think she knows her audience and is very savvy in using these terms because as you say they "resonate". So, I think she's making the right business decision to use the terminology. I'm saying personally I'd use different terminology to qualify things to keep/not keep.
Fair warning for people with ADD/ADHD or otherwise struggle with organization: removing clutter is a different thing than hiding away everything so that the room is magazine-photograph ready. Being able to use your environment to give you visual reminders of various outstanding tasks and statuses is an incredibly important coping technique for people with executive function issues. Like, I have a bunch of open wire shelves for storing the bulk of my groceries - otherwise, I tend to literally forget that I have something, and I won't notice when I get low or run out of things. It's ugly as hell, but it's a functional ugly, and dropping functionality to make things pretty is not really a good idea IMO.
This also highlights why it's so helpful to eliminate clutter; the things you see are the things that matter.
When I open my fridge, I don't see amorphous 'stuff'; I've got leftovers one and two here, extra ingredients that need to be used there and there, and the rest is staples that remain there and get replaced as needed.
Anything that doesn't fit that gets tossed. If I can't pick it up and come up with a plan for it, it goes in the bin. If it's a longer-term plan, it gets noted on a list stuck to the door. ezpz
I waste less food now, and have less stress about meal planning. Pantry is similar; at this point I can just glance at a shelf and sense whether I'm low on something.
Oh nice, sticking the note on the door is really useful for that sort of thing. But yeah, the key insight is to make your environment as useful as possible for the goals and life you want to have.
Given the housing prices in the Bay Area, comparing the joy you get from something with the cost to store it, can really help with decluttering. I live in a smallish apartment, and was tempted to rent some extra storage for stuff like holiday decorations and other stuff used seasonally. Then I realized at $100/month for the extra storage, it is cheaper for me to buy the seasonal stuff every year and then when I am done with it to throw away/recycle it.
I own an English version of her book and recently bought a German copy to give as a gift for Christmas. Strange as it may sound, even though I don't really like the "style of the method" it's very efficient. Thanking the items and the whole sparking of joy are a bit over the top for me and chapter 5 is by and large too spiritual for my taste. I toss the stuff away without any parting words and joy for me is more a "is it useful" or "do I really need this" (which is pretty much what she has in mind anyways).
What I consider pure gold is:
* Dumping everything on the floor and going through that mountain because it shows you very clearly how much stuff you have
* All the advice on folding. I actually enjoy the folding and storing now because I know it's more neat overall. I vastly prefer the vertical shirts to a stack now. I probably wouldn't have considered rethinking the old stack of stuff if it wasn't for the book
* Giving items a home of sorts is also a good overall concepts. I have caught myself thinking "this item is out of place, let me quickly return it to its home"
* Going by category instead of location...really helps me get started/keep tidying
On a related note, I found the Netflix series surprisingly underwhelming/repetitive. The most useful parts were the folding explanations.
tl;dr: MK's stuff is great, I'd recommend the book to everyone :)
I was taken with the main idea of this paragraph from the essay when I first encountered it a while back:
A cluttered room saps one's spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there's less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there's more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what's around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.
It actually stands out to me as odd, given the rest of the article. The same could be said about movies, games, toy cars, etc. Any 1 thing is easy to own a lot of, so long as it's small.
It's when you have multiple collections, or even 1 collection that's too large, that it's a problem.
I have a lot of hobbies that I do only occasionally, and the stuff from them is a little overwhelming. And when combined with all my wife and I have kept because we might need it some day, the hobby room is a disaster area.
We've even gone over our limit on books. To store more books, we'd have to get rid of other things at this point. And most of those books just sit on shelves and never get read. Some might, but overall they're just not actually being read.
To make it worse, books are one of the things that could be digital instead of physical and they could take no space at all. I even prefer reading on my Kindle over a physical book.
In the end, I just can't agree with him on books. (And I don't think Marie Kondo does, either, based on watching a few episodes of the TV show.)
> Three experiments tested the novel hypotheses that orderly environments lead people toward tradition and convention, whereas disorderly environments encourage breaking with tradition and convention—and that both settings can alter preferences, choice, and behavior
Drawing conclusions from a single research paper referenced from an _opinion_ piece correlating messiness to alterations in choice and behavior in no way discounts the benefits of a clutter-free environment.
Though I agree that there's a reductionist aspect to this declutter thinking, I've always thought the answer to this question is "an ordered mind", which is very different from an empty mind of course.
I think the implication was "an empty mind." Picture not a cleared-off tabletop, but an office desk with drawers where both the desktop and the drawers are empty.
> Decisional procrastinators report that they have too much clutter, which interferes with their quality of life, and clutter, in turn, is the best predictor of procrastination.
Hmm... n=1 anecdote, but I hate clutter and lead a minimalist lifestyle yet procrastinate quite a bit.
It's just a trailer for the show. This small japanese woman walks in people's homes with a huge smile and helps them organize their stuff. Houses are mostly full of piles of unneeded things and there are many cutscenes of people crying over getting rid of some things with sentimental value (deceased husband's clothes for example).
Most of the conversation in this thread is about the content of the article. The video was just for context.
Mise-en-place is the religion of all good line cooks. Do not fuck with a line cook’s ‘meez’ — meaning his setup, his carefully arranged supplies of sea salt, rough-cracked pepper, softened butter, cooking oil, wine, backups, and so on. As a cook, your station, and its condition, its state of readiness, is an extension of your nervous system... The universe is in order when your station is set up the way you like it: you know where to find everything with your eyes closed, everything you need during the course of the shift is at the ready at arm’s reach, your defenses are deployed. If you let your mise-en-place run down, get dirty and disorganized, you’ll quickly find yourself spinning in place and calling for backup. I worked with a chef who used to step behind the line to a dirty cook’s station in the middle of a rush to explain why the offending cook was falling behind. He’d press his palm down on the cutting board, which was littered with peppercorns, spattered sauce, bits of parsley, bread crumbs and the usual flotsam and jetsam that accumulates quickly on a station if not constantly wiped away with a moist side towel. “You see this?” he’d inquire, raising his palm so that the cook could see the bits of dirt and scraps sticking to his chef’s palm. “That’s what the inside of your head looks like now.”
I imagine most developers will recognize the obvious parallels with our craft.
The full passage:
https://books.google.com/books?id=XAsRYpsX9dEC&lpg=PA65&ots=...