The title of this book would lead you to believe it's about minimalism. In fact, it's about figuring out how to do better, while doing less. Learning how to ask what is essential, and focussing on it, to the elimination of things that don't matter.
Learning to take time to make sure you do the best job on the things that matter and don't live that FOMO kind of life, where you say yes to everything because it might be the important thing.
I picked this up as a companion to the Crucial Conversations and Crucial Accountabilities books, because VitalSmarts, the producing company of those, had also started courses based on this book.
There are significant elements to be taken from this to be more organized in your work and be more productive in each moment. But I found that for the most part, I seem to have taken a lot of these on without even having been instructed how.
So while I think this book is probably very valuable for a lot of people, I found myself bored and skimming. If you're looking for ways to be more productive, this is definitely a good text, but be aware that most of the suggestions are very common sense - you could probably implement them without having read the book, if you were able to separate the notion of being busy from that of being organized.
#42-2021
Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
I decided to start the year off with a reminder of how to keep myself tidy and organized. I read Kondo's "the Life-changing magic..." several years ago and had intended to immediately follow it up with this one, but I'm glad I put it off.
As I read, I remembered things from the original book and ways that I could incorporate her suggestions into my life and my style. I'm not a KonMari convert by any means, but she does make a number of great points, and having the refresher with this "illustrated" guide was just what I needed to make a few changes.
