I received this book as a Christmas gift from one of my friends who is a huge Marie Kondo fan. While I did enjoy this one quite a bit, some parts I felt were repetitive and mostly stuff I had heard before — this was mostly chapters 4 and on, where Kondo's co-writer Scott Sonenshein writes about tidying as it pertains to digital work, time management, decisions, and networks. To be honest, when I read the "note to reader" at the beginning of the book and discovered that, out of 11 chapters, Kondo only "primarily wrote" 4 of the chapters, I did feel a bit disappointed — I mean, I knew going in that this would be a collaborative effort between Kondo and Sonenshein, but I guess I was expecting the writing to be either more evenly distributed between the two or Kondo being the primary author, since she does have more of the name recognition after all (case in point — I know my friend, for one, bought this book purely because of Marie Kondo's name of the cover…she has absolutely no clue who Scott Sonenshein is). The other thing too is that, as I was reading, I noticed distinct differences between Kondo's writing style and Sonenshein's, so when both were mashed together for this book, I felt that the flow was kind of odd and, for me at least, it did affect the reading experience more than I was expecting it to.
Having said all that, content-wise, I felt like this was one of the better "how to organize your work life" books that I've read (and I've read plenty of similar books over the course of my 20+ years working in corporate America). What made this one different in my opinion was the tone and the approach. Business self-help books (at least the ones I've read) tend to be "overly preachy" to the point that they can turn a reader like me off fairly quickly — not just because the content can sometimes be unrealistic and/or irrelevant to my job situation (i.e. turn off your email for a few hours or shut your office door to visitors for the day!), but also because the tone is often heavy-handed, with a "one method fits all" approach where oftentimes, you are made to feel like something is wrong with you if you don't follow the writer's advice. With this book, I didn't get that vibe at all — in fact, I got the opposite vibe in that the emphasis was on how everyone's situation is different and to do what works best for you (or not). As I've said before, I can't stand "overly preachy" books, especially ones with what I perceive as a pretentious tone that essentially try to guilt-trip the reader towards a particular direction, so it was refreshing to see that this one didn't take that route.
Overall, I did like this book, but as I mentioned above, I definitely would've liked it better if Kondo had been the sole author. Though I'm not a Marie Kondo fanatic like my friend, I do have a lot of admiration and respect for her work and appreciate what she has been able to achieve over the last decade. And while the effectiveness of her methods is subjective in that it might or might not be a right fit for certain people, I think what she has going for her (and why her methods are easier to accept) is her positive attitude (with a focus on joyfulness) as well as her non-aggressive approach that is very different from what we may be used to here in the United States. If Kondo does write another book at some point, I look forward to reading it. Meanwhile though, I should probably go check out her show on Netflix (I'm not a huge TV watcher anymore nowadays, as I don't have the time that I used to, but I'm willing to make an exception in this case).
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