This is Marie Kondo. She teaches people ‘the Japanese art of decluttering and organising.’
Marie Kondo (or ‘KonMari’) recommends going through all your things, category by category¹ and only keeping those that ‘spark joy’. She makes a clear distinction between her approach and minimalism though –It’s not about having less stuff, because as she tells Tim Ferriss, it’s about loving what you own. Only keeping things that make you feel positive.
So today I Kondo’d my iPhone and Macbook. This is what the home screen of my iPhone now looks like²:
And the 2nd (out of 2): 
I deleted all apps that don’t bring me joy. I have no social media apps and also, chatting is tedious, feels like a chore and is just plain shitty, so I deleted the only chat app I had, Whatsapp (in order to call my friends more instead). Music, podcasts, books and radio stations Triple J, BBC Sportsworld and Country music station Wolf FM bring me joy, along with the compass app (which can’t be deleted anyway, but am I the only one who think it’s kinda cool to see where I am in relation to the North Pole?). Notes is self-explanatory, Maildiary’s an excellent journalling app which I write in every night, and the last one, called ‘Gross’, is full of the shit I can’t delete. I got that idea from my friend Matt, who calls his shit-he-can’t-delete folder ‘Boring’.
And this is my desktop:
Next step is to Kondo all the stuff in my real life.
—
¹ She believes in having these ‘katazuke matzuri’s (‘Cleaning parties’, or ‘festivals’. For the actual Japanese term see the pic above, that one of my Japanese students, Ayumi, wrote out for me) where you go through and organize your things by category, not by room or place. And the order she recommends doing it in? 1st: clothes. Then: books, documents, miscellaneous and lastly, sentimental things.
² I have another phone but I use that only for calls, chatting with 1 friend who’s travelling, and texts ONLY when a call isn’t appropriate.