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"...
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.
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.
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.
1: http://plaintext-productivity.net/3-00-files-introduction.ht...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 guess in a sense it's characterized by a positive, visceral reaction. But that's not a very marketable description.
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.
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.
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.
I'm drawing a parallel to DRY when programming - First time copy it, second time move it out somewhere.
However keeping cables/cable tidies/diagnostic USB inside the machine, and labelled is a fantastic idea, and I will be using that. Thanks!
All this discussion of Joy versus Utility is silly: it's either/or, and if you can, both.
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.
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.]
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.
Please do! I've been doing my fair bit of KonMari recently, but I have a fair bit of rationalising to do with regard to getting rid of things.