When working with my clients, I sometimes receive the question “How many (insert category or sub-category name) should I own?” or “What is a good number of (insert category name) one should have on hand?”. First things first, in the KonMari Method™, there is no specific number of how many items per category you “should” have (after all, KonMari doesn’t equal minimalism). There are no boundaries or restrictions you have to adhere to in order to “do the KonMari Method™” right”. If you follow the method’s 6 core principles, you’re doing it right.
Joy Or No Joy?
When it comes to determining how many items one should keep, the only deciding factor is if the item brings you joy. If it does, keep it. If it doesn’t, it’s time for the item to go. It’s that simple. No numbers you have to keep in mind or adhere to. Joy = stay. No joy = thank you and goodbye.
To Consider In Addition
However (of course, here comes the “however” 😉), apart from joy checking the individual items, you might also want to take into account your home as a whole. How does the number of items you decide to keep affect your overall joy level? After all, we all have a limited amount of space to live in and store our things. Consider the following when you tidy:
1) Storage Space Capacity
The size of your house or apartment determines your lifestyle (at least to some degree). And that also means how many items you can house under your roof, unless you have multiple homes or rent out a storage unit (which I don’t recommend). Think about that before you start tidying and make your goals realistic and work for you and your space for the time being.
2) A Certain Number
Sometimes, a certain amount of something might spark joy for you. For example, you only might want to keep 10 sweaters because you feel like that’s (more than) enough for you, your circumstances and the climate you live in. You don’t want to dedicate more space to sweaters. Now that’s a number you set for yourself because you want to. You don’t HAVE to but it’s a way to set yourself some boundaries.
3) Aesthetics
It might be important for you to create a more minimalist looking environment with clear surfaces and closets that are not stuffed to the brim. Similar to the point above, you want to set yourself some boundaries here if a specific look and feel is important to you and if you don’t have unlimited storage capacity. So that might mean you only want to keep a number of clothes that nicely fit into your closet. Or only keep as much kitchen stuff as can fit into your cabinets, so that nothing has to be out on the counters. IF that’s important to you.
How To
If you’re asking yourself now, how should I approach this? I’m already overwhelmed! Easy. First, joy check each individual item (by category, of course). And oftentimes this step is enough to arrive at the perfect amount of items that suit you, your home and your lifestyle.
However, if that’s not the case or you’re not sure, just look at how many items you’re left with from a particular (sub-)category. After all, this is the beauty of the KonMari Method™ – you can easily see how much you have of one particular category and thus make very informed decisions. For example, if you’ve gone through clothes and you’re left with your piles of jeans, dresses, t-shirts and so on it’s easy to maybe do a second round if you feel like you want to reduce the number of clothes by some more so that they fit into your closet.
Also, don’t forget that all storage is temporary until you’ve completed tidying your entire home. So that allows you to do some tweaking and re-assessing certain categories in the very end as well.
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