Kondo's first tip and my determination to get organized conveniently line up: She recommends organizing everything in one fell swoop; I was ready to tackle every. last. product.

Technically, Kondo says if you're getting serious about cleaning, you need to do your entire pad all at once; otherwise, you risk slipping back into your old, messy-person habits. For the purposes of this story, I applied her principles for cleaning the whole house to just my beauty products (which, admittedly, take up a huge chunk of my apartment). This means I went through and discarded things by category (hair care, skin care, body, makeup), starting with the easiest products to get rid of (the ones I care least about -- sorry, hair care) and ended with the "love letters and sentimental items" of my beauty collection -- makeup.

I walked into my bathroom, took a look at the shelves overflowing with hair products and the end table packed full of makeup, and naively thought: Self, you are ready for this.

Honesty time: This wasn't my first clean-up-my-beauty-products rodeo. A few months prior, I had gone through and done what I thought was a total purge (the five garbage bags filled with leaky shampoo bottles and goopy body lotion seemed to confirm this). Yet, there were still so many things left over.

Worse, my bathroom had gone from clean and deceptively organized to a sloppy mess of piles and boxes. Sound familiar? Kondo says this happens to most people -- but not after following her method, which involves keeping only items that bring you joy. Unfortunately, I have a tendency to get overexcited about new beauty products, so I knew that deciphering between lust and love was going to be a challenge.

According to Kondo, you keep only the products that bring joy when you touch them -- the act of touching is very important. It's easier to determine how important something is to you by picking it up. She believes that, in order to truly appreciate the things that are important to you, you first have to ditch the things that have "outlived their purpose."

Unfortunately, even starting with hair care products, I was reduced to a Gollum-like figure, clutching bottles of shine serum like they held the greatest power in all of Middle Earth. Finally, I summoned the strength to toss things that didn't truly make me happy into either the garbage bag or giveaway bag, depending on the state of the product.

And so it went for a while longer. I got into a rhythm. But then I looked around and saw I hadn't made much of a dent; it was like spending an hour at the gym and finding out you burnt significantly fewer calories than you thought (definitely not enough to make up for the ice cream you ate last night).

I sat cross-legged on the floor of my cramped bathroom, the smell of the supposedly scent-free trash bag that housed several pounds worth of products overwhelming me. The products I had decided to keep were scattered around me. And hundreds of products were still awaiting their judgment. It was, in a word, a hellscape.

There was still so much to do, and the act of throwing things out is very emotional (the fact that I had Taylor Swift blasting in the background probably didn't help matters much).

Maybe I'll just put a few things away, I thought. Seems logical, right? Wrong, according to Kondo.

"Start by discarding, all at once, intensely and completely," she says. This means no organizing as you go. You have to get through the discard portion before you can even think about where you're going to put away your pared-down collection of nail polishes, so you don't get distracted and slip back into bad habits later on.

The time I spent being overwhelmed allowed doubt to slip, insidiously, back into my mind. But, I need these products for work, I told myself. Who else is going to try that serum that's been sitting, unopened, for months? But that doesn't fly with Kondo's technique. #NoExcuses.

She cites a client who was a CEO and had business books upon business books that were unread. He wanted to keep all of them, because he might read them "sometime." Or, other clients who made it only halfway through a book but plan to finish it "someday." Real talk from Kondo: Sometime will never come. This is your chance to let it go. For me, that means that the half-used eye cream I tossed aside has served its purpose, and that purpose was to be used halfway.