Helen Youn

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Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

March 14, 2020

As a Certified KonMari Consultant, this is one of my most anticipated books of the year. Special thank you to Little, Brown and Company for an advanced copy of Joy at Work.

In Joy at Work, we see once again different ways to apply the life-changing KonMari Method to all areas of your life. Previously, Marie Kondo’s books The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Spark Joy focused primarily on how to tidy up your living space. Joy at Work is a collaborative work between Marie Kondo and Scott Sonenshein, a professor and best selling author of Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less. This book is focused on organizing all aspects of your professional life.

As a Certified KonMari Consultant, I live, breath and teach the KonMari Method everyday but I still found so much value in Joy at Work. In the book, Marie Kondo breaks down how you can tidy up your work space both in the physical world and also digital world. She offers specific advice on how you can deal with paper, email, digital files, calendar, meetings and even how you can look at your job and responsibilities with different perspectives of joy.

Joy at Work is both inspirational and practical. I especially enjoyed reading the case studies and stories from Marie and Scott’s personal lives. It was refreshing to see Marie Kondo’s vulnerable side as she shared stories about her own struggles from the time when she was an employee working for a corporation to now running her own successful business alongside her husband, Takumi Kawahara. Marie wrote about letting go of her fear of others’ opinions, how becoming parents changed her perspective and how they, as both a couple and business partners, prioritize projects to achieve and maintain work-life balance. After all, joy at work sparks joy in life.

This book gets a solid 5* from me. You can pre-order this book now as this title will be released on April 7, 2020.