In 2014, I was a young parent of three young children, ages 12, 10, and 7. Since we’d been a single-earner household all along, money had been perpetually tight. Kids grow fast, and my kids, at least, were never particularly careful with things, so it always felt like I was having to find money for more clothing, shoes, and household goods that hadn’t survived the boys, on top of the usual ongoing expenses. I had a stay-at-home husband who was great at caring for the kids, but who did nothing at all to keep the house at all clean, which meant I spent any time not at work trying to combat the always-looming clutter and dirt that four people accumulate when they’re all at home all the time. (By that time, all three of my kids were enrolled in a cyber charter school, meaning they were effectively being homeschooled with a curriculum that was delivered online. I was the only person in the household who wasn’t here 24/7.)

It wasn’t just personal life that was challenging, either. Two years prior, the company I worked at had been acquired in a transaction that turned out, in the end, to be a particularly ill-suited match for what we did. As a result, my work life was consumed with trying to make this mismatched transaction work, at least to the extent that I had influence to do so. Due to the company’s instability, raises and bonuses were difficult to come by, further exacerbating the belt-tightening.

With all of that as a backdrop for my personal experience, Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up came out in the United States. To say my reaction was derisive is a massive understatement. The blurbs that made it to the news were, to my mind, even more ridiculous. She was saying we should get rid of books, of all things? We were supposed to get rid of anything that didn’t spark joy? I was convinced that Ms. Kondo lived in another reality, one that did not include the life I was living, about 80% of which (let’s face it) definitely did NOT spark joy. I dismissed the book – and Ms. Kondo – outright.

Fast-forward to 2026. I am now a 50-year-old mother to three adult children. They live at home, true, but they are all capable adults who clean up after themselves and contribute to the household management. No longer are they outgrowing clothing at the speed of light, and no longer are they somehow managing to break all of our dishes or cups during one workday. That stay-at-home husband is trying to help out more around the house. We’re still a single-earner household, but things are more settled now. Work is calmer, too; I now work for a company that seems, at least from where I’m sitting, to be more stable and more employee-friendly. I work remotely full-time, which means that I have more time to do the tasks of everyday life than I used to when I had a 90-minute commute each way. (That alone is a reclamation of three hours every single workday!)

With this new backdrop, I picked up Ms. Kondo’s Joy at Work, a book that purports to take the lessons she first wrote about in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and apply them to one’s work life: not only the physical work environment, but also our digital work lives. It was on sale, and I’ve been on a work-related self-help kick lately, so I figured “why not?”

And this is where I get to the part of the review in which I say I was wrong. I vacillate between just thinking I was wrong and being a bit gentler on myself, thinking I just wasn’t in a place to receive the information in the book. Overall, though, since my dismissing it outright without even giving it a shot was how I reacted, I’m sticking with “I was wrong”. Joy at Work is a small, readable book that balances inspiring anecdotes and actionable advice to lay out a comprehensive blueprint for how to get our workspaces back under control. Ms. Kondo is surprisingly (to me) flexible in her advice – yes, she does advocate for culling books, for example, but she also provides the rationale for that and says that if that rationale doesn’t work for you, don’t do it. The advice is concrete and clear, and it’s written in such a way that it feels warm, encouraging, and doable.

Bottom line: I’ve learned two things from Joy at Work. First and more obviously, I’ve learned a lot that I intend to apply to my own home office about how to tidy a workspace and keep it tidy. Second, though, and more importantly, I’ve learned a lesson about judging a book before I even read it. I do think that even had I tried to read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up in 2014, I would not have been in a place to internalize and use the advice within; I was in survival mode and there would have been no room in my life for a “tidying festival”, nor would I have been able to maintain any level of tidiness with four people in the house all day every day counteracting any efforts I made. But I might have been less derisive and less judgmental about it, and that’s something worth keeping in mind.