Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The main point of this book is that to declutter, you should start in one small area of one room, work for 10 minutes a day, and do it every single day. Get rid of what you don't really need or don't love. Repeat. My advice after reading this: don't buy a book on decluttering - just look at a few websites on decluttering and go for it! That said, I thought I'd give a more thorough review of this book because I made it all the way through to the end, and I have some thoughts. I bought this book to help motivate me to declutter, and I thought it would have some helpful tips. Here is what I found: The first 38% was devoted to "building the habit", why you should declutter, and what to buy (because apparently you need to buy more stuff to get rid of stuff and get organized). While reading this, I really just wanted to start decluttering but forced myself to slog through this because I felt like I had to read the whole book. After the first couple of pages, I probably should have just skipped to the room by room, step by step directions, but I like to read books cover to cover. Excessive verbiage throughout. This is a short book, but it could have been more concise and a much better read, especially if the first 50 pages were condensed to about 2 pages. You can assume people reading this book already want to declutter, otherwise why would they buy the book. This book is 169 pages long. It probably could have been about 8 pages total and given me the same (but most likely better) information. The authors use a lots of links to lists of things on the authors websites, links to other books the authors have written and want you to buy, links to images of decluttered spaces on Pinterest, and links items to buy on Amazon. It is nice to be able to click to links to clarify or enrich, but it was used so excessively in this book it was distracting. Some of the advice sounded wrong. "As a side benefit, fewer toys reduces the amount of conflict among siblings". As one of four siblings, I can tell you most fights with my siblings had nothing to do with toys, and reducing the number of toys will not prevent the usual "I want that toy because my brother is playing with it" attitude I frequently see in my young nephews. I'm not a child psychologist, nor did I take the time to search pubmed for articles on sibling rivalry, but a quick google search did not bring up any articles about the number of toys correlating with number of conflicts between siblings so I'm moving this to the "unproven, probably wrong" category. Some of the advice stated as a fact is flat out scientifically wrong: "germs can grow on bar soap and easily spread from one person to another." This is the type of thing my mom reads on Facebook and warns me about and then I have to prove to her it's not true. A quick google search will tell you that yes, bacteria do grow on soap, but no, you will not get sick from this bacteria, even if it has been used by a sick person. Both liquid soap (the "preferred" soap in this book) and bar soap remove bacteria and germs from your hands when you wash your hands, and both are extremely effective. Use whatever you prefer. (But don't use anti-bacterial soap, because normal soap is just as effective at getting rid of germs and anti-bacterial soap contributes to antibiotic resistant superbugs[...] All of this combined left me with an unfavorable opinion of the book. I want to declutter, but free advice on blogs is just as good, much more concise, and hopefully not full of misleading information that doesn't have any scientific basis. Why do I give the whole book a bad rating based on the soap issue? Besides the advice on soap, I am not sure what is good advice and what is just nonsense they just made up off the top of their heads and put in this book so I can't really trust anything that is in it. I was going to give it two stars because I like the room by room, step by step decluttering process, but multiple scientific inaccuracies indicate the authors didn't do their research when writing this book, and now potentially thousands of people who read this book might be repeating the bad information this book presents.