My rooms and work tables tend to get messy.
As any procrastinator will tell you, they get cleaned up as often as there are big tasks looming. Somehow, tidying up right before a major deadline feels like an excellent use of time.
Every now and then, I’d muster the energy to apply first principles to the clutter around me. I’d dive into mammoth efforts to collect, clean, sort, and organize everything I owned. The result? A beautiful, decluttered space… that lasted a few days, maybe a week. Slowly but surely, the mess would creep back.
Then in 2018, I discovered Marie Kondo and her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. In the very first chapter, she hit me with a truth so obvious I’d been blind to it: I could never banish clutter because I owned too much stuff.
The real secret to decluttering was hiding in plain sight: own less.
That insight changed everything. I began letting go of things and buying only what felt truly necessary. It’s still a journey—learning to live with less, and to value space over stuff—but it’s one worth taking.