If you’ve been awake for the past year, you’ve heard of Marie Kondo, the Japanese home-organizing guru, and her hit Netflix show Tidying Up which features her KonMari method of organization.
There’s a good reason why Marie and her method are a hit. In episode after episode she walks into messy, disorganized, heavy American homes and leaves them lighter, more orderly – and strangely more authentic than they used to be.
There is much to be said for various elements of KonMari, but these 3 elements stand out to me as especially effective:
- Breaking down large problems to their component parts. KonMari breaks down house organizations into 7 steps – first you tackle clothes, then books, then all paper documents, etc – and finally items of sentimental value. This makes the problem manageable and gives a continuous sense of progression.
- Insistence of Scanability and Intelligibility. If you’re a UX designer, you probably understand these concepts intuitively. In every category, be it clothes, books, or miscellaneous items – KonMari insists on the new organization to be immediately scannable and intelligible. Clothes are divided into categories and folded in a way that makes them all instantly visible. Same with every other category. Everything in your house will have a place, and will be easy to locate and retrieve.
- Consulting Our Emotions. Perhaps the biggest secret to KonMari’s success is that it teaches us to consult our emotions. For each item in your house, you’re encouraged to ask yourself: Does it spark joy? If it does – you keep it. If it doesn’t – you say goodbye. Through this process of tapping your emotions, the muscle is built and one can become more aware of whether or not the various things in our home are adding to or subtracting from our experience.
So what does this have to do with business tools? Well in the past two decade or so, we began to live more and more inside certain business tools, that mediate our interactions with team members, clients, and the work itself. Often they even mediate our relationships to our own thoughts! I’m talking about chat tools like Slack, issue management tools like Trello, Jira, and Asana, email clients like Gmail or Outlook, and design tools like Photoshop, Sketch, Figma, among many other tools in many other categories.
Since our minds effectively “live” inside these tools, and since we force our employees to live inside of them – it is valid and important to ask: Do they bring us joy?
In the beginning – tools like Slack did spark joy. But today they’ve become a source of distraction, stress, and a feeling of inadequacy as it is often unclear how someone can do their job AND keep up with Slack at the same time.
Slack does not spark joy.
It is time to thank it and say goodbye. Tools like Twist are here to replace it, with a distraction-less threaded discussion tool that will bring back the Zen.
Does Trello spark joy? It used to, when the project was small and a small number of tickets and columns were enough to hold it. But now the board is so massive and it is so hard to even know what’s going on.
Trello does not spark joy. Time to switch over to a power tool like Jira or Asana.
The larger your company is, the greater the chance you are still running some legacy software that makes your employees unproductive and miserable, and prevents them from even doing certain things or having certain thoughts. The places and tools we inhabit are simply that powerful in shaping us and what we can do. Like in the show Tidying Up, you won’t know how much your baggage was holding you back until you get rid of it.
So it’s time to ask your team: Does this app spark joy?
—
Remake Labs is a global Design Sprint agency dedicated to better outcome through rapid prototyping.
