My study of tidying began in earnest when I was in junior high and basically consisted of repeated practice. Every day I cleaned one place at a time—my own room, my brother’s room, my sister’s room, the bathroom. Each day I planned where to tidy and launched solo campaigns that resembled bargain sales. “The fifth of every month is ‘living room day’!” “Today is ‘clean the pantry day.’ ” “Tomorrow I conquer the bathroom cupboards!”
I maintained this custom even after entering high school. When I came home, I headed straight for the place I had decided to clean that day without even changing out of my school uniform. If my target was a set of plastic drawers in the washroom cupboard, I would open the doors and dump everything out of one of the drawers, including makeup samples, soaps, toothbrushes, and razors. Then I would sort them by category, organize them into box dividers, and return them to the drawer. Finally, I would gaze in quiet admiration at the neatly organized contents before going on to the next drawer. I would sit on the floor for hours sorting things in the cupboard until my mother called me for supper.
One day, I was sorting the contents of a drawer in the hall cupboard when I stopped in surprise. “This must be the same drawer that I cleaned yesterday,” I thought. It wasn’t, but the items inside were the same—makeup samples, soaps, toothbrushes, and razors. I was sorting them by category, putting them in boxes, and returning them to the drawer just like I had the day before. It was at this moment that it hit me: Tidying up by location is a fatal mistake. I’m ashamed to admit that it took me three years to see this.
Many people are surprised to hear that such a seemingly viable approach is actually a common pitfall. The root of the problem lies in the fact that people often store the same type of item in more than one place. When we tidy each place separately, we fail to see that we’re repeating the same work in many locations and become locked into a vicious circle of tidying. To avoid this, I recommend tidying by category. For example, instead of deciding that today you’ll tidy a particular room, set goals like “clothes today, books tomorrow.” One reason so many of us never succeed at tidying is because we have too much stuff. This excess is caused by our ignorance of how much we actually own. When we disperse storage of a particular item throughout the house and tidy one place at a time, we can never grasp the overall volume and therefore can never finish. To escape this negative spiral, tidy by category, not by place.
Don’t change the method to suit your personality
Handbooks for tidying often claim that the cause of clutter differs depending on the person, and that therefore we should select the method that best suits our personality type. At first glance, this argument seems convincing. “So that’s why I can’t seem to keep my space tidy,” we might think. “The method I’ve been using doesn’t suit my character.” We can check the handy chart on what method works for lazy people, busy people, picky people, or nonpicky people, and choose the one that fits.
At one point, I explored this idea of categorizing methods of tidying by character type. I read books on psychology, interviewed my clients about their blood types, their parents’ characters, and so on, and even tried a popular type of astrology called Dobutsu uranai, or zoological fortune-telling. I spent over five years analyzing my findings in my search for a general principle governing the best method for each personality type. Instead, I discovered that there is no point whatsoever in changing your approach to suit your personality. When it comes to tidying, the majority of people are lazy. They are also busy. As for being picky, everyone is particular about certain things but not about others. When I examined the personality categories suggested, I realized that I fit all of them. So by what standard was I to categorize people’s reasons for being untidy?