you’ll have to excuse my English, as a French person I hope my writing won’t be too bad. Since I’ve watched your TED Talk on Youtube, I’ve bought and read all your books about time management. They are a pretty useful resource for me and I would like to thank you for that.

Ever since the first episode of the podcast with Sarah (Hi) I’ve been listening, with my male perspective, and I’ve been able to relate to most subjects you’ve talked about.
My wife is a nurse in a cardiology department where she works out of schedule, I am an engineer in a logistics company and we have a 4 year old boy.

I just wanted to intervene in the discussion as you wanted to have men’s opinions on the
KonMari method, so I wanted to share my opinion. It should be known that in our home, I like to think that we have an equivalent distribution of the “tasks” of the home, with a dominant for the planning on my side, and our son activities of for my wife.

To return to the subject of the book, I read and appreciated the general message without fully applying all the concepts. I applied a number of principles on the sorting of my personal belongings and enormously reduced the number of objects and especially clothes that I kept since high school and that I did not put any more of course. I shared this method with my partner and she did with me the exercise on the objects of the house (mainly furniture and decoration).
Before reading this book I already had a great tendency to organize and preserve the essentials. It simply gave me a basic idea of how to do it more efficiently.

@Diane C – Thanks for sharing your perspective on this. I guess I do keep coming back to the idea that once every 2 months is just not that much. You might be gone, say, Sunday-Friday those weeks, but the homesickness would be kept in check knowing that you would be back there in just a few days, and then would be home for the next 7 weeks. Going for 3-4 days every week might make the homesickness kick in a bit more, since it would feel like one was always leaving.

Just catching up on podcast episodes, and I wanted to comment on the Q&A question. I completely second Virginia’s thoughts re: the challenges of traveling for work not necessarily being just about logistics. There are a lot of different sides to work travel and some people might find one aspect easier or harder than others. I travelled a lot for work and when my first child was born, emotionally it was very difficult for all of us. I was always asked how I made the traveling work, and my response was always, “I have a very supportive husband.” For us, the logistics were the easy part, the part that we could prep for most easily because the solutions to the logistics issues are very actionable (i.e. Hire extra help, shift my husband’s work hours, set up social time with friends so he doesn’t feel isolated, set up bill pay, stash breast milk, etc.) However, what was hard for us as a family was missing each other and not having that in-person, face to face, daily emotional support, especially since I was several time zones away. As a consequence, I sometimes felt it was harder to focus at work while away from home. I had to really compartmentalize – focus on my job and keep my mind off my family when I was at work, and then also have very defined work hours. When I was away, I found it easy to get very entrenched in work since I didn’t have to “be home for dinner” or whatnot. Because of this, I sometimes would forget to call home. This lapse, more than anything else, was what caused resentment for us. I finally realized I had to make time for family when I travelled, just as I would when home – my co-workers knew that at 6pm, no matter what, I had a Skype date with home. And like Virginia says, it does get easier, particularly once the kids can have a real phone conversation with you and you are past the slog of just keeping the baby alive.

I actually think a lot of the debate/ controversy comes down to personality – do you prefer your environment orderly or not? I used to think this was a J/ P thing on Myers Briggs but if I remember correctly, Laura, you’re an INTJ so there goes my theory.

In any event, I think some people prefer to have their things out and some like me like to have it all put away. Someone once told me some people like PILES and some like FILES 🙂

For me, outer calm leads to a peaceful brain so I’m a huge advocate of clear spaces, minimal stuff lying around, and also, like Sarah, I actually get huge satisfaction in tidying a space.

http://www.marciafrancois.com/blog/2017/05/08/which-do-you-need-more-inner-or-outer-calm/

I don’t spend a ton of time tidying but I am pretty ruthless about throwing away stuff that we don’t need or seem unlikely to use. My husband can always think of a time we *might* need what ever random thing so I am largely thwarted at home. But at work I have some organized piles but they are all active! If you guys have a follow up to this I’d be interested in hearing tips for convincing a spouse with minor hoarding tendencies to part with some of their/ house hold crap!

With regard to the Qand A I must be really difficult to live with (despite letting my husband keep all his junk!) because I fiund it really hard when he traveled when our daughter was young, even less than a week at a time. I definitely feel like there are some conversations that might be worth having ahead of time depending on your temperaments and work schedules. For instance – my husband would typically come back from traveling and be completely drained and need extra time to recover, sleep and unfortunately catch up on other work after traveling. So expecting a lot of time to myself after he got home was not likely to happen. Depends in part on the type of travel and if you are a “good traveler”

The other sort of practical thing I would say is if the listeners husband has a lot of strict deadlines for his job i would advise them to go the nanny route as opposed to daycare. My poor kid was home sick a lot her first year in daycare and I would do hours of work when she finally went to bed when she was sick just to meet important deadlines and I really did resent how I bore the brunt of that for various reasons. At least with a nanny you aren’t so 100 percent on the hook for a sick kid.

Side note – I am totally on Laura’s side with email. I’m surprised no one has mentioned the flags in outlook or the stars in Gmail (or maybe I missed it). I always flag/star items that need followup later, and sometimes I even set the reminder date so I get a notification. You can also easily tell when a new message arrives in an important thread.

She also talked about having a defined amount of space for certain items, which plays into what Sarah said about toy organisation a little while back – and I use it for my clothes now. I have one big drawer that holds all of my exercise/lounge clothes (in three rows folded KonMarie style 😉 ) and if my clothes are no longer fitting in there then I need to get rid of something rather than buying new storage.

And I do actually empty out my bag every day. I only work 1-2 days per week, and the amount of stuff I need to bring to kid’s activities varies greatly. All of the important stuff like house keys gets put away consistently in the same spot.

Order amongst chaos I guess?