What are the main thrusts of the Marie Kondo method?....

[another20]

I read up on this online earlier in the year and it just cluttered up my head -- saw loads of charts and infographics - surely there is a simple 10 point plan?

A 1-point plan. Pick up an object, if you feel a spark of joy, you may keep it. If you don't, you throw it away.
It feels quite hardcore at first, but it's so much easier to keep the house tidy and clean if there's less stuff in it.

Get rid of stuff.

1. Sort by category, all of one type of thing at a time eg. all clothes.
2. Handle everything and think about your relationship with it. Discard anything that doesn't spark a positive emotion.
3. Don't try to store anything until you've finished discarding.
4. Store everything vertically and in view in its storage space.

Those are the things I took from it.

paperwork is the main issue here -- spark of joy for my tax returns / utility bills / appliance instruction manuals .... feel like dousing in petrol and throwing a match on it all.......

Reading the book is worth it, you can summarise, but it's better to get the feeling from the book itself. I bet you can get it second hand now for not much at all.

The summary though is:

1. Tidying is not an everyday thing, it should be a one-off or a "cleaning festival", to be celebrated. You must do it all in one go (but can spread over several sessions/days/weeks as long as you know you're still doing it)

1. Identify your destination before you begin (something which is presented as vital in the book but seems to be ignored in most of the articles). - This is deciding what function you want your space to have and how you want to feel about your home.

1. Tidy by category not by area. Divide into subcategories if a category is too large. There is a suggested order of categories, you can google it.

1. Decide what to keep by holding it and seeing how the item makes you feel. If it brings you joy then you keep it. If it doesn't, then it goes. (For more utilitarian items, you can think about whether the item enables you to do something more easily or how you'd manage the task it fulfils without it, or you can hold onto it but make a mental note to replace it with something which is more joyful).

1. Say thank you - out loud - to discarded items for their service, even if they were never used. You can say things like "Thank you for teaching me that yellow is not my colour" or "Thank you for showing me that MIL cares about me"

1. When the discarding phase is finished store all items of the same category together. Make sure you place them for maximum ease in putting away, rather than maximum ease getting out. It's best to store things vertically so that you can see everything at once and they take up less space.

1. Only tidy (in the sense of the konmari process) your own things. You can do it for children under 3 and help children under 13. Don't badger your husband or teenage children into doing theirs.

I think... that's it. Some of it happens as a result of the others, like because you now know and appreciate everything you have you take care of it more nicely. Because you're now more conscious of what you like and don't like you should (in theory) be more careful about what you bring in.

Chuck everything away that is surplus to requirements as Japanese people live in very small homes, apparently.

She actually pretty much advises that

There is lots of stuff on paperwork and marie kondo if you google it. But the upshot is - only keep things which you need for legal reasons AND you can't easily get a copy of if you need to. Throw everything else away. There's no need to keep all your utility bills from the last 3 years, the latest one is enough, in fact, most now let you access your bill from their website - so phone up and go paperless. Easy!

I did forget about one point of categories. Very important - sentimentally valuable items go last in one big category.

Oops my first sentence was in response to wanting to burn all paperwork.

The two biggest differences for me compared to other decluttering styles were:
Going by category not space - whenever I've decluttered an area before it gradually accumulates clutter again.
The default is to get rid of each thing unless you actively want to keep it. This is such a change of approach, and it makes such a difference.

And don't hold onto things because you feel guilty about them - eg a brand new dress that you've never worn nor will ever wear. It brought you joy when you bought it and so has served its purpose.