3 Marie Kondo tips on working from home
Organisational superstar, Marie Kondo, has come to help us navigate tidy workspaces with her new book, Joy at Work. Marie wants to help you maximise your working capacity by organising your work area. This has never been more helpful as many people across the world learn to work from home. If you need help maneuvering working from home, here are 3 Kondo tips! You can also scroll to the bottom to watch Marie talk about creating a home workspace and how to spark joy while studying at home! Update! Marie has also shared some new tips for working from home… with joy!
Computer desktop 💻
The joy sparked by a tidy desktop can be quite addictive. But I must confess that I only started keeping mine tidy recently. One day a fan came over to talk to me while I was working on my laptop at a cafe. I was so mortified by how cluttered my display was that I’ve kept my desktop tidy ever since…
Now the only things I keep on my computer desktop are a folder marked ‘Storage’ and any other items, such as photos, that I want to use that day. I consider my computer desktop to be a workspace, just like my desk, so I display only those things that I intend to use right away.
My storage folder is like a filing cabinet. Inside are two folders, one called ‘Documents’ and one called ‘Photos’, as well as a document I need to review soon and photos that I’ll be using within the next few days. The ‘Photos’ folder contains photos I would like to use in near-future projects.
How you categorise your digital folders will depend on what’s easiest for you in your line of work.
Books 📚
Perhaps you’re thinking it would be better to just choose them by looking at the titles while they’re still in your bookcase, but please don’t skip this step. Books that have stayed too long on the shelf have become part of the scenery. Only by taking each one in your hands can you actually see them as separate entities.
Ask yourself when did you buy it? How many times have you read it? Do you want to read it again? And whether you would still buy that book if you saw it in a bookstore. Sometimes people ask me how many books they should keep, but there’s no fixed number. If books spark joy for you, then the correct choice is to keep as many as you want with confidence.
‘Home’ office 🚪
Deal with work-related items separately from personal items. For example, if some of your books and documents are work-related while others are not, identify only the work-related items for now and focus on tidying them, leaving personal items for a later date.
The order in which you tidy is important in the KonMari Method. In the home, I generally recommend starting with clothes and progressing through the more advanced categories in the order of books, papers, komono (miscellaneous items), and sentimental items. I recommend this order because starting with the easiest and working up to the hardest category helps us develop our capacity to choose what to keep or let go and decide where to store everything. For tidying the workspace, just drop the clothes category and proceed through books, papers and komono. Work on one category at a time. Begin by taking out every item in each category or subcategory and piling them in one spot.