If Monica was not a figment of our FRIENDS-verse, she would be filled with envy and temptation. Envy, of Gayatri Gandhi’s career, and temptation, to leave her restaurant job to become a professional organiser. Many of us feel an urge to align and organise everything, be it a slightly tilted frame on someone else’s wall or arranging a drawer that needs attention. But Gandhi, who is India’s first Marie Kondo certified decluttering specialist, does this for a living.
Gayatri Gandhi: Cutting through the clutter
An independent woman working with one of the world’s most renowned television channels, Gandhi had everything people aspire for: a well-paying job, opportunities of travel, and a dynamic work life. But she left that to establish her own organising venture, Joy Factory. So what made Gandhi leave that to explore an unheralded career path? While she was in the middle of a sabbatical, she picked up Marie Kondo’s book, The Life Changing Magic Of Tidying Up, and her life was never the same after that. The book, which inspired the Netflix series, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, simplifies cleaning and claims that by doing just that, your life can change.
“I did a lot of research because the idea was very fascinating and because I felt that this brought a change in my own life, just the way Marie Kondo says in her book. I felt that I can say very confidently that this process or the philosophy works. This is when I decided I will take this up very seriously. That is when I went to New York, I went for my course. I studied with Marie Kondo because I decided if I have to do it I’ve got to do it with the best, and not do it with anybody else,” Gandhi revealed.
Gandhi expressed how Kondo’s philosophy immediately fascinated her: “It’s her philosophy—the basic question she asks, ‘Does it spark joy?’. It is asking yourself if the little things that you own in your life spark joy. Does it make you happy? Does it make you feel good about owning that stuff? I think that is so positive, so forward-looking, and just so satisfying. It resonated with me so much,” Gandhi explained.
Clutter and the Mental Mess
We love our rooms to look a little ‘lived in’; a little mess can make it feel cosier. Having said that, when there’s way too much clutter and the space around us is disorganised, we may constantly feel bogged down by an invisible weight on our shoulders. Organising is important, not just so you can save space and time, but also for your mental wellbeing.
Gandhi explained that when there is a mess around us, our productivity and efficiency goes for a toss, and we find it difficult to maintain focus. “People are now understanding that clutter doesn’t just impact your physical surrounding, but also your mental state. This is why I feel that several people are now cognizant of the fact that this is important. There is still very less understanding of the fact that physical clutter leads to mental instability, leaves us feeling very low on energy or low on productivity and low on efficiency,” Gandhi pointed out.
Organising can be therapeutic
Studies suggest that having too many visual elements in our space can cause us stress, due to the overstimulation of our brains. But organising it can detangle your anxiety. “Psychologically, clutter has a deep impact on your mental well-being,” Gandhi explains. She asserts that cleaning, therefore, can help you regain control of your life and feelings. “Yes, decluttering is that kind of an activity where even if other things are not going okay in your life, it makes you feel like you can accomplish a lot more,” Gandhi adds.
She advises that when you’re feeling stressed, give yourself a cleaning project. “Identify one shelf or a drawer in your house that needs cleaning and tidying up, and see the difference in your behaviour—and that’s actually true. The day you’re feeling very bogged down and don’t know what to do, try and clean a very messy drawer, and observe a complete 360-degree shift in how you’re behaving,” Gandhi explains.
How to make organising less overwhelming
When you have guests coming over, you quickly clear out the mess that can be visible to them. You store things away in a trunk, or a bag and you pretend that it doesn’t exist. Gandhi says that it is important to just clean the mess we can see but also that remains hidden away.
“The KonMari philosophy is very perceptive because the question of whether it sparks joy is very interesting. It actually makes you introspect and ask questions differently. Most of the time what we end up doing during the Diwali cleaning is that we clean everything, but we also put back everything. Seldom do we take those things out of our homes. So, decluttering comes before organising. This is something we really need to focus on, otherwise, we just keep organising clutter from one place to another,” Gandhi advises.
She went on to give us some organising tips that will help us be more organised. Here they are:
1) Make your own bed
Make your own bed first thing in the morning, because that gives a feeling of accomplishment that comes instantly.
2) Put back what you take out
Please put back anything you take out and don’t procrastinate without reason. Take for example that remote we take out, and then, while we keep watching television, it’s lying on the bed, then it’s lying on the side table, anywhere. Then it doesn’t go back to where it’s supposed to.
3) Assign a home for everything
Assign a home for everything in the house. Let everybody in the house also know where it has to go back to—whether it’s a drawer or a shelf. If an item doesn’t have a home, then it will keep scattering around. Then it will go from one console to a shelf to a desk, and it will just add to the clutter.
4) Group items of the same category
Keep like with like, which means that keep the same category of an item together. Keep all your books together. Keep all your clothes together. If you otherwise scatter the same category across the house then chances of clutter is more because you forget, and when you forget, you will not remember what you have.
5) Store vertically
Always try storing vertically, instead of horizontally. When you store horizontally, things get hidden one below the other and then you forget all about them. And then of course, we all know, out of sight is out of mind.
“Once you do it with these five tips, trust me, a lot of your life and a lot of your things will come into place and that’s wonderful,” Gandhi signs off.