* And of course there is also the popularity of Marie Kondo’s bestselling book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Ironically, Kondo herself warns against the tidiness temptation: she says that carefully organizing one’s possessions in clever storage solutions is a “booby trap.” She’s right. Trying to impose order by rearranging a house stuffed full of possessions feels like it should help, but it doesn’t. A more accurate title would be The Life-Changing Magic of Throwing Out All Your Stuff, a policy on which this book takes no view either way. But “tidying” in the sense of “categorizing and storing” is overrated. Chapter 9 of this book shows, for example, that people who carefully file their documents are more likely to be overwhelmed by them.