Now folks, this is a somewhat weird book. I highly recommend it or I wouldn’t include it here, but there’s no question that Ms. Kondo has her own idiosyncratic view of how you should treat your possessions. Being one of her clients must be quite an experience, as she insists that things be done her way or else. (She has a three-month waiting list for her personal consultations, so people don’t seem to mind.) She has two central ideas. The first is the one that’s the most problematic for me: that you must do the tidying up of your surroundings all at once. If you do it gradually, she says, you’ll never finish. In an ideal world she’d probably be right, but most of us can’t really take a whole weekend to throw out stuff. If we have to do it that way, we’ll never do it at all.
Tools
Boy, Am I Going to Get Organized!
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland, Crown Business, New York, 2014.
I am an absolute sucker for any book or article that tells me how to do more in less time. I’m a terrible timewaster/procrastinator/piddler. My mother used to say to me, “Debi, do you have to make such a project out of everything?” But here’s a book that sort of pushes the idea of making your life into a series of projects. It’s mainly directed to the business world, but, like the dinner book and the choosing college wisely book, there are wider implications to these ideas, and Sutherland acknowledges that fact. He includes a discussion of how Scrum would work for planning a wedding, but it would really work in any situation where you’re trying to get a specific task done or event carried out.