Here’s What Happened When I Reorganized My Bookshelves According to My Own Advice

How are you managing with quarantine and the pandemic? If you are able, I hope you’re still staying home and that you are staying safe. One thing I’ve noticed about being home so much more, is that I have more time for home improvement projects–including the subject of today’s post: reorganizing my books.

If you read Apartment Therapy, you may have seen a post on their website about book organization tips from a librarian. Surprise! I’m the librarian they talked to.

I’ve talked before (here) about my devotion to Marie Kondo and the KonMari method but, because of space constraints I do have to periodically re-tidy my books so I took advantage of quarantine to do a comprehensive sweep of my bookshelves. Here’s how that went.

First things first: I have a to small folding bookcase (similar to this one on Amazon) where I keep books to read. I unimaginatively call this my to read bookcase and it holds books I receive for review or as gifts, books I bought myself, and anything else I want to read.

After reading Joy at Work and thinking about what I needed in a work from home space (I’ll be talking more about this in another post) and realized I could consolidate the books into two shelves and use the top for desk accessories which has vastly improved my entire desk setup.

Here’s a picture with the books:

The right stack on the middle shelf is ARCs/titles for review and the left is more general books to read. The bottom shelf are books I’ve bought/grabbed from work giveaways/received as gifts. I have been making a lot of progress reading through these although you can’t necessarily tell from here. Please, also enjoy my assortment of owls.

Once this was under control. It was time to turn to my read bookshelves in my bedroom. These are a challenge in general because they’re awkward to get to and none of them are actual bookcases so the shelf heights and depths are a little weird.

Here’s what I was starting with:

As you can see these shelves were pretty packed. I’m a fan of vertical book storage but it was getting hard to keep my stacks together and I realized I wasn’t maximizing space. Plus, some of the shelves were too tight to properly take out books. Changes had to be made.

So I did what Marie Kondo advises and put all my books on the floor. Then I picked every book up and asked if it sparked joy. A couple hours later I had 30 some odd books to giveaway and the rest to return to my shelves.

I call my shelving strategy vibrational shelving. What that means is I group like with like (author, genre, etc.) but I don’t necessarily alphabetize or organize beyond that.

Here’s what my cleaned up shelves look like:

The big wins here were I eliminated an entire shelf on the skinny unit and have room to grow on these floating shelves. My brag items (special editions and multiple editions) have room to breathe and are showcased all together instead of piecemeal.

It’s still a work in progress because my work, my hobbies, and my personality mean that I am always acquiring more books but I feel good about having this as my framework for what to keep and what to pass on moving forward.

Now that you’ve seen how I organize my shelves, tell me about how you organize yours (or tell me what you think of my strategies) in the comments.

Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life: A Non-Fiction Review

How many times have you left a meeting that could have been an email? How many handouts and papers accumulate on your desk over the course of a week? How often have you been taken away from work you want to do to focus on tedious but seemingly endless tasks at work?

If you’re like most people (particularly those who work in offices or computer-heavy jobs), the answer is probably a lot.

What if there was a better way? In Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life (2020) organization expert Marie Kondo works with organizational psychologist Scott Sonenshein to translate Kondo’s by now ubiquitous KonMari method to office and work life.

Find it on Bookshop.

If you are familiar with the KonMari method from Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (or her show on Netflix), a lot of the ideas here will be familiar or even common sense. What different and makes this book so valuable is the specificity used to apply this advice to a work setting ranging from office work, digital life, to interpersonal relations.

Co-author Sonenshein, an organization psychologist who researches how to make work and careers more rewarding, brings in scientific data to support findings and helps shift focus from the home to the office.

Chapters and sub-headings help break down all the information provided starting with Why Tidy? and what to do If You Keep Falling Back to Clutter.

From their the chapters have granular focus to tidy: Your Workspace, Digital Work, Time,  Decisions, Your Network, Meetings, and Teams. The book ends with ways to Share the Magic of Tidying and Spark Even More Joy at Work.

It’s important to note that every idea here won’t be applicable to every work scenario–partly because of the focus on office work and partly because not every employee will be in a position to say “I don’t want to go to this meeting.” That said, as with the KonMari method in general, readers are able to take as much or as little as they choose to apply to their work life. The tips here are invaluable when working in a shared office space but, for me, have been equally helpful in the past few months as I work from home.

In general the crux of the book is the focus on quality over quantity and to seek meaningful work and connections rather than saying yes to everything and every one. Joy at Work also centers the idea of work as accumulated experience (even if it isn’t “fun” work or work that feels like a learning experience) and also on choice as you ask yourself to choose what you want to keep to build your ideal workspace and, eventually, your ideal work situation.

You might be asking yourself how Joy at Work is any different from Kondo’s first book (or Sonenshein’s first book for that matter). The key thing here is the way Joy at Work drills down on both digital tidying and also interpersonal relations. Intuitively it makes sense and is a next step from the original KonMari method but it’s nice having it spelled out here.

I finished this book feeling inspired and energized to get back to what I love about my job. It also helped me visualize what I needed to make my work from home space make sense during quarantine. Changing up work habits and tidying work things hasn’t been easy, especially while working remotely, but the progress I made largely came from internalizing the advice given in Joy at Work.