This is Stevea Robbins.

Welcome to the Get It Done guys quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

When we left our prior episode,

Marie Kondo, author of the book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,

had taught us several things about obsessively,

I mean reasonably, cleaning your apartment, house, houseboat, or cardboard box.

Using her method, Shmoopee and I went from having an apartment that looked like a war zone

to one that looked like the happy spotless isolation chamber of a mental ward.

Please don't ask how I know what that looks like.

We learned from Marie that we shouldn't clean room by room, rather we should clean by category,

and we start by discarding the things that

don't bring us joy. But that brings up the obvious question, how do we deal with the things we

want to keep that don't bring us joy? You know, that third-grade finger painting your child did

of the neighbor's dog climbing the sycamore tree? The one that you still have on your refrigerator,

even though your children are away at college and have been begging you to throw it away for years? Time to toss it. But I'm throwing away my

children's lives. Your inner parent screams. Your inner parent is wrong. It is time to declutter

your house. Organize your house according to increasing emotion. When you choose the categories to

declutter, do them in the order of increasing emotional attachment. Your first category should be

one that you hardly care about at all. Clothes. We're used to getting rid of clothes when we've

had them for a long time, or we've torn them, or we've accidentally dropped an entire Oreo

ice cream

cake on them. My therapist and I are still processing that one. Next, choose a category that you

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