Covid 19 coronavirus: Marie Kondo on staying sane while working from home

Arguably, Marie Kondo was built for the kind of crisis that is living in a lockdown. Photo / Getty Images

Marie Kondo is right on time, of course. It's 7.30pm, but lunchtime in LA where the Japanese tidying expert now lives, and when she pops up on my laptop screen, she is startlingly, preternaturally beautiful. Perfectly composed and self-contained, she seems otherworldly, not least in comparison to the civilians who share the screen: me in one corner, her translator (Marie Iida, familiar to anyone who watched smash-hit 2019 Netflix series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo) in another.

Kondo has evidently already trained her immaculately manicured hands not to touch her face, allowing them to flutter only occasionally before the camera to emphasise a point or show me the rose-gold MacBook Air and single notebook on her almost empty desk.

This is my first interview since the start of the coronavirus pandemic: Kondo was the one who insisted on video rather than face-to-face, presciently so; when the interview was first arranged, we weren't nearly as far down the path to panic and no one was contemplating a full lockdown.

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But arguably, Kondo was built for this kind of crisis. Not for her family – husband, Takumi, and two daughters, aged three and four – a descent into hoarding and chaotic self-isolation. Her mission, ever since she discovered a talent for organising aged just five, has been about creating calm through tidiness, keeping only those things that 'spark joy', as her catchphrase goes.

As anyone who even flirted with the KonMari Method outlined in her first book, 2011's 10-million-selling The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, can attest, purging your possessions and carefully curating what's left really does make you feel happier, lighter and calmer. And now, more than ever, she's an evangelist for its powers.

'There is so much anxiety in the world right now, and I do feel like there's a need for self-reflection, to ponder that question of how do you want to live your life,' she says through her translator, her soft, high voice soothingly musical.

'One solution is to tidy your home, because that process is discovering what's most important to you. It allows you to control the environment you are able to control, so it does offer a solution in that sense.

'It's a process of clarifying what's going on inside you as well, and the more you are in touch with that, the calmer your viewpoint of the world. Even if you feel society is mired in anxiety and restlessness, this makes you see what's in front of you, and remember the things and people you do have, to foster a feeling of gratitude for them. That has a calming effect on your heart."

Somewhat ironically, the book we're here to talk about today is about a place few of us are able to be right now: our workplaces. Joy at Work is the fourth spin-off of her original bestseller (so her fifth book in English, but her ninth in Japanese), following, most recently, one for teens: The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up.

This book, co-written with professor of management Scott Sonenshein, covers how to organise your workspace and also tackles digital decluttering – how to tidy your smartphone, computer, even your calendar, of which more later. But while most are unable to work in our offices, many are still working from home, where clearing a space – physically and psychologically – that allows for concentration if you're all cramped together 24/7 is more important than ever.

While she's mostly associated with tidying homes, from the off she was also tidying workspaces – meeting clients at their offices hours before the work day began to help them sort through mountains of paper (early mornings, she says, are best for tidying offices). She bluntly demolishes the kind of theories that might get in the way of a clear-out: such as that mess somehow equals creativity, and neatness is boring.

Much of what she advises in the book – which, of course, was written long before the current crisis – can equally apply to a home office. She has three hard rules about desk storage, for instance:

Rule 1: designate a place for each item and store by category.
Rule 2: use boxes and store things upright – this will help maximise space.
Rule 3: don't store anything on top of your desk.

"Your desktop is a work surface, not a storage cupboard," she writes. "The only things on your desk should be whatever you need right now for the project you are working on."

On this last one, she's a little flexible: she allows you to keep pens in a stand on your desk rather than in a drawer, and you're also allowed an ornament or a potted plant.
When we speak, she has a bunch of pink flowers in a vase; Takumi has a wooden "zen egg' on his desk: "It has a calming effect, when you're pondering something," she says.

There's a daily ritual for the post-corona germ-phobe too, which she used to do when she worked in an office: when you arrive each morning, wipe the top of your desk, your computer, mouse, keyboard and phone, and on Mondays, do a deeper clean – the legs of your chair, the cables under the desk.

"It sounds like a lot of work, but altogether it took less than a minute," she writes. "Yet it made my desk area look so neat and tidy, it seemed like a world apart. The atmosphere lightened, and it was easier to get down to work. While my hands were busy cleaning, I could empty my mind and make this part of my day into a little meditation, a ritual that allowed me to switch into working mode."

There's a degree of anxiety in letting Marie Kondo visit your home, even without her physically there, so in the hours before our scheduled call, I find myself trying to tidy up, but it's a futile gesture. A few months earlier, I would have been proudly showing off my neatly labelled boxes on the shelves, because I am a Konvert, albeit a lapsed one. I've sorted beauty products, clothes and electrical cables according to the world-famous KonMari Method: dump everything into an enormous pile, sort by category and only keep what truly sparks joy.

As I sheepishly point to the shelves behind me and start to explain how I once "Kondo'd" them, I catch a glimpse of the look on her face: the shutters have come down, stress momentarily flashing across it.

"That's great to hear," she says, when I tell her that her new book arrived just at the right time, but even via the translator I can hear it's an automatic response.

What must it be like to be Kondo: instantly recognisable, continually accosted by fans eager to show her pictures of their Kondo'd cupboards and drawers, hungry for her approval?

• Covid19.govt.nz: The Government's official Covid-19 advisory website

"It really depends on the person," she says, before insisting, somewhat hollowly, that "what makes me particularly happy is when people share that they have finished tidying by my method, and share with me how their life has changed afterwards".

To have your name become a verb must be an odd feeling. She nods. "It feels very strange. To know it has permeated so much around the world is very surprising."

No one could have predicted the phenomenon she would become. No one, that is, except editor Tomohiro Takahashi, who, according to an article in the Japanese publishing journal Shin-bunka, bought the book before she'd even written a word, after her proposal won first prize in a publishing training course called "How to write bestsellers that will be loved for 10 years".

"She's going to be on TV and become famous," he reportedly told Shin-bunka. "I felt a mysterious energy around her that I had never experienced around other people."

According to the journal, he worked with her intensively on the book for eight months, and when it came out, he was proved right: with worldwide fame following her success at home in Japan.

The story Kondo herself tells is a little different. As she describes it, after setting up her organising business as a student, she gradually gained so many clients that she had a waiting list, at which point people started begging her to write a book so they could gain her expertise. The book, she has said, took three months to write.

Like all the best superhero-origin stories, Kondo's is a story of continual triumphs over adversity. In the past, she has related how her mania for throwing things away as a child eventually drove her parents to ban her from tidying. But it was her mother's zeal for housework that initially inspired her interest.

"She would go about it with so much joy, it looked like she was having so much fun," she tells me. Her childhood home was "a very normal, ordinary Japanese home. It looked very organised on the surface, but once you opened the shelf [sic] it was very cluttered."

As a schoolgirl, she became so obsessed with purging her possessions that she had something akin to a spiritual awakening. "I would come home from school every day and wander round the house with a rubbish bag looking for things to throw away," she has recounted previously. "One day, when I opened the door of my room, everything in it looked dark and murky and I thought, 'I hate everything in this room, I'm going to throw it all away, I never want to tidy again.' And I fell to the ground."

When she awoke two hours later, "Everything in the room was shining and I realised that you shouldn't be looking for things to throw away, you should be looking for the things you want to keep."

Perhaps the greatest misconception about the KonMari Method is that she does not, in fact, insist that you should chuck out most of your possessions; rather, as The New Yorker put it, she advocates a kind of "transformative existential keeping".

As anyone who even flirted with the KonMari Method outlined in her first book, 2011's 10-million-selling The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, can attest, purging your possessions and carefully curating what's left really does make you feel happier, lighter and calmer. And now, more than ever, she's an evangelist for its powers.

"There is so much anxiety in the world right now, and I do feel like there's a need for self-reflection, to ponder that question of how do you want to live your life," she says through her translator, her soft, high voice soothingly musical.

"One solution is to tidy your home, because that process is discovering what's most important to you. It allows you to control the environment you are able to control, so it does offer a solution in that sense.

"It's a process of clarifying what's going on inside you as well, and the more you are in touch with that, the calmer your viewpoint of the world. Even if you feel society is mired in anxiety and restlessness, this makes you see what's in front of you, and remember the things and people you do have, to foster a feeling of gratitude for them. That has a calming effect on your heart."

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My spring cleaning squad. ✨

A post shared by Marie Kondo (@mariekondo) on Apr 11, 2020 at 9:59am PDT

Despite the medieval-sounding fainting spell, and the fact she worked for five years in a Shinto shrine, she refuses to describe her work as a religious calling or even spiritual. But that childhood revelation did lead to what is the central differentiating principle to her method: a kind of animism. Before you discard something, she asks you to thank it for its service; she thanks her purse when she puts it away at the end of each day. To non-Konverts this may sound silly, but it's oddly freeing. As someone who clings to things out of guilt, it has helped me.