This week, I went through my entire wardrobe and got rid of things that don’t spark joy.

Some of you are smiling because you recognize the technique developed by Marie Kondo, a famous home-organizing expert. Her solution to any keep it or get rid of it decision is to ask if the item sparks joy. If the answer is yes, keep it. If the answer is no, out it goes.

Why do we surround ourselves, she asks, with things that don’t bring us joy? Not just our clothes, but all our possessions. Why shouldn’t we, instead, fill our personal spaces with things that give our hearts a flare of happiness when we see them, when we touch them?

And so I decided to Marie Kondo my clothes. After putting everything onto the bed – every shirt, sock, pair of pants, jogging outfit, shoe, tie, pair of underwear, tee shirt, etc – I began dividing the stuff into two piles: the joys versus the joy nots.

I held up each piece of clothing and judged it with my internal joy meter. Sure enough, some things were not just utilitarian and attractive, they made my heart glow ever so slightly. These went into the keep pile.

And sure enough, some things created no such response. Per Kondo, I thanked each rejected item for its service before adding it to the get rid of pile.

After an hour of steady work, I picked up the last thing, an ugly olive drab sweatshirt that not only didn’t spark joy, it made me cringe. I thanked it and wished it well as I tossed it atop the get-rid-ofs. I gathered the joyless items and packed them in bags to be taken to a thrift store.

This sorting process cut my wardrobe in half.

I brought up some wooden apple boxes from the basement and stacked them open side outward in my closet, creating a rustic-looking set of shelves.

The only things that went on hangers were my suit, a pair of dress pants, a sports jacket, and my collared, button-up shirts. Everything else (except shoes, of course) were folded and laid in plain view in the sideways-facing boxes.

For my socks, I created a couple of custom, 5x5x8-inch boxes using foam core board and a hot glue gun. White socks went in one and black dress socks in the other.

It turned out that I had more clothes than I had stacking space, so I thanked some sweatshirts and pants, and with apologies, added them to the no joy bags.

When done, this arrangement of joy-sparking clothes pleased me so much, I was reluctant to close the closet doors. So I took the doors off.

Never before in my life have I been able to see, in a single glance, all the clothes I own. No household chore in the last 12 months has made me as happy as this did.

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