What tidying does not settle
Three method books read the same year, and their shared limit: they organise a stock, while the scarce resource is attention. What survives once that promise is removed.
Marie Kondo, Tim Ferriss and David Allen are not writing about the same thing, but they share a structure: an inventory, a sorting rule, a place to put things. Applied to objects it works, because a stored object stops calling. Applied to keeping up with a field it fails: a stored article goes on waiting, and a well-kept filing system mostly produces the satisfaction of keeping it.
Archiving an email rather than deleting it looks prudent, and is not. Nobody reopens a three-year-old email. A mailbox that keeps everything accumulates, on top of the useless, invoices and confirmations that have no business being there the day the account is breached. Deleting should be the default, and keeping the exception you argue for.
Three tabs, ten bookmarks. The figures are arbitrary and that is their only virtue: beyond them the decision is made once instead of being reopened with every new tab. What does not fit the limit is closed or sent to a reading list. And periodically emptying the browser teaches, in hindsight, what was actually needed, which is to say almost none of it.
A newsletter is sorting done by someone else; a syndication feed reads a blog without its packaging. Both beat searching as you go. Automatic recommendations sort too, but towards a goal that is not mine, and that deserves restating each time you use them rather than once at the outset.
What remains is long reading, the slowest sorting and the most profitable. An idea that looks new almost always sits inside a history, and knowing which one saves walking a road already walked. That is where these three books still serve: not as a method, but as a reason not to inform yourself solely from what has just appeared.
None of these habits gives time back. They reduce the number of decisions, which is not the same thing: though the tiredness of a working day comes more often from decisions than from hours. As for the promise of a four-hour week, I have never seen it kept by anyone whose job is to answer for systems in production.