August Roundup: Finding Tokimeki at Work
August 2026
In July we kept the Weekly Tokimeki Questions wide open, so you could answer them about pretty much anything in your life. If you missed it, our July Roundup covers how our first month went, along with the incredible responses you shared.
From August, we wanted to start taking Tokimeki into specific parts of everyday life, focusing on one area per month. Work felt like the obvious place to start, since almost everyone has some kind of relationship with it, whether it's a happy one or a complicated one.
This month, we focused our questions on Tokimeki at work and in our careers: where it shows up, and how you can learn to recognize the things that spark joy for you, even in small ways and even if the job itself doesn't light you up. It might be a tool you love using, a task you secretly look forward to, a skill you've built over years without ever thinking of it as a source of joy, or a colleague who has had a positive impact on you.
Your answers came back full of matcha waiting on the corner of a desk, notebooks worn soft from use, and flowers set beside a keyboard, along with the tasks you secretly enjoy, the skills you're most proud of, and the people who make your work enjoyable. Reading through them became the part of the week our team looked forward to most, and by the end of the month a lot of us were looking at our own desks a little differently.
Small things that made you smile
We eased into the month with a more open-ended question, before getting into the work-specific ones later on: What is one small thing that made you smile today?
For Marie, it was a walk with her son. He stopped to pick up a fallen leaf, and the look on his face as he studied it was so lively and happy that she found herself smiling too. In the video, she kept the ask small.
"It doesn't have to be big," she says, "a kind word, a quiet moment, a cup of tea. Stay with that feeling for a few seconds."
Slowing down long enough to feel a small joy fully is how sensitivity to Tokimeki starts to build.
Hiroko answered with the sunrise she'd watched that morning:
"Watching the sunrise this morning made me smile. It reminded me that every new day is a fresh start filled with Tokimeki."
Jen had found what she called "the most adorable coffee and bookshop" near her, where she had "a delicious lavender latte" and picked up a book from her want-to-read list.
The smiles you sent ranged from pets being silly to hugs with friends and quiet time with family, and we're glad the month started there. It's easier to notice a small lift at your desk once you've remembered what one feels like on a walk or at the kitchen table.
You can see more of what the community shared in our collage.
What sits on your desk
The second week is where the questions turned to work, starting with the spot where most of us spend the working day: What's one item on your desk that sparks Tokimeki for you?
Marie's answer was a mechanical pencil.
"I've used this same series for over ten years," she says. "I love how small it is. It fits my hand perfectly." The smooth grip and the way it writes are part of it too, and as she puts it, "I love everything about it."
Nikki kept hers simple, with a photo of an iced matcha on a wooden tray beside the window.
Blessing shared a small Peppa Pig figure her niece gave her in March, before she left home. It has sat on her desk ever since.
"Whenever i look at this peppa pig, i think of home," she wrote. "and somehow, it fills me with so much joy."
Neither of these is the kind of expensive equipment or tech that usually comes to mind when people picture a good workspace. Both are small and sentimental, and most of these objects' Tokimeki comes from what they connect you to, whether that's a slow few minutes in the middle of the workday or someone you love back home.
Our community's Tokimeki workspace photo dump is here:
The task you secretly enjoy
The third question asked about the parts of a workday other people might never notice: What's one small work task that secretly sparks joy for you?
For Marie, it's the search for exactly the right words when she's sharing her thoughts, and the moment a phrase finally matches what she feels on the inside. Anyone who has rewritten one sentence five times will recognize the relief of getting it right.
For Zetet, who makes content, the best part is brainstorming with her husband, "my partner in crime," bouncing ideas back and forth until everything clicks and they high-five.
Ami's is putting drawer inserts in so that every item has its own home, the kind of task that might give Marie a little flutter too.
Tasks like these rarely show up in a job description or a performance review, so it's easy to go years without admitting how much you look forward to them. Noticing them is a small act of honesty with yourself.
More of your answers are in our community collage.
Skills your work has given you
The last question of August asked about something you carry with you from job to job: What's one skill you're proud you built through your work, or one that supports your work?
Marie's is very much her own.
"I can look at a drawer, and just know what size box will fit perfectly inside," she says. "I can also look at a box, and know exactly which drawer it belongs in."
She calls it a rare skill, and one that helps her every day, at work and at home. It grew out of years of doing the thing she loves, which is a good picture of how Tokimeki and craft can build on each other.
That week, two of the answers we loved came from our own Tokimeki team. Linny had never made any video content before her current job, and she's grateful her work pushed her out of her comfort zone and into creative storytelling in new formats.
Mars picked short-form video editing, a skill she learned through her work. "the feeling when each cut matches the music is true Tokimeki," she wrote.
Neither of them set out to learn video content. Their work asked it of them, and somewhere along the way the skill itself became a source of joy. It's worth looking back at the stretches of work that felt unfamiliar at the time, because that's often where the skills we're proudest of were built.
See more highlights from our community here:
The people who shaped your work
The first question of September stayed with work for one more week and turned our attention to the people in our careers: Who is someone who has positively influenced you at work?
This one was more of a small ritual than a question. We asked you to close your eyes, picture that person, and thank them in whatever way felt natural, whether that meant tagging them in the comments or saying it silently to yourself.
Grant thought of a former colleague from a first job, who inspired
"a vocation rooted in curiosity, deep learning, and integrating it all reflectively and meaningfully alongside other people."
Sonal's answer reached beyond the office, to her kids, who she says are teaching her to smile and let go, however hard life gets.
The people who shape how we work can be a colleague from years ago or the kids at home, and most of them have no idea of the impact they make on us. The more we take the time to notice them and show our gratitude, the further that joy spreads, to them and then on to the people around them. If someone came to mind as you read this, they might like to hear it.
Alongside the questions
We keep the Weekly Tokimeki Questions very simple on purpose. We believe starting small is the best way to begin, so each question is meant to bring an answer to mind easily, and the posts we share through the rest of the month are where we go deeper into the philosophy and how to put it into practice.
In the middle of the month, Marie recorded a short video about what happens to career decisions once you've spent some time practicing Tokimeki. Her point is that the noticing you do at your desk adds up, and eventually it starts to show in the bigger choices too.
"You might pass on an opportunity that looks perfect on paper," she says, "because deep down, you know it's not right for you. Or you might say yes to a path that makes no logical sense... simply because it lights you up."
If you'd like to go further with the theme, a few other posts from August are worth a look. Marie opened the month with the story of how she turned tidying into her life's work, including the moment she shifted her focus toward the things that truly make her happy.
We asked what your career might look like if joy were the first thing you considered, with prompts about the parts of your work that energize you and the moments you've felt most proud.
Our Tokimeki for Career carousel set the usual questions about a job, like whether it's stable and pays well, beside a question people ask less often: are you actually excited to go to work each day?
Later in the month, a post on leadership suggested asking who you want to be while you get the work done, since the leaders people remember most are often remembered for how they made others feel.
Tokimeki for Entrepreneurship looked at how following what energizes you might lead to building something of your own, starting small and experimenting first.
Our Tokimeki quiz offered a quick way to check how you feel about your work right now, and a reminder about courage acknowledged how hard it can be to trust your intuition and act on what lights you up, one small decision at a time.
When it changes the whole job
At the end of the month we asked some of the KonMari consultants in our community how following Tokimeki had shaped their work, and several of them described changing careers entirely. Melinda told us it has
"allowed me to turn my own life-changing experience of tidying into meaningful work, helping others let go of a lifetime of possessions and create space for a joyful next chapter."
Ha had spent years moving between different careers and countries before she
"chose to trust my Tokimeki after tidying my home with the KonMari Method, and eventually became a KonMari Consultant."
None of these stories describe an easy decision. Leaving a career you trained for, or starting again in a new country, asks a lot more of you than noticing a favorite object on your desk. But the joy each of them eventually found in their work passes to the people they help. As Marine put it,
"The answer is always within, but sometimes it needs someone to find it."
You don't need to change careers or make a drastic decision to practice any of this. For most of us, and for most weeks, it can be a pencil or a task you secretly enjoy, and that's enough.
A practice for this week
Here are five prompts to try this week, one for each of the weekly questions above.
- The first question asked what small thing made you smile. Think back over your last working day and find the moment that came closest to a smile, even if it was only the edge of one. How does it feel to remember it now?
- The second question asked about the one item on your desk that sparks Tokimeki. Is there something on that desk you keep out of habit and never actually reach for? Picture it gone, and notice whether the desk feels lighter or emptier.
- Think about the small work task that secretly sparks joy for you (either the one you named for the question if you took part, or the one you'd pick today). Who in your working life would be surprised to learn you secretly enjoy it, and what do you feel when you imagine telling them?
- The next question asked about a skill you're proud you built through your work. Go back to the first week you tried this skill, before you were any good. What do you notice in yourself as you remember that version of you?
- The final question asked who has positively influenced you at work. Turn it around: is there someone at work you might have influenced in a small way without ever being told? How does it feel to imagine you could be someone else's answer to this question?
If you'd like something to keep in front of you, write one line for each of the five answers on a single index card and prop it against your screen or on your desk for the next week. Notice which line you've caught yourself looking at or coming back to the most.
There are no right answers to any of these. You do not have to change anything about your work because of what you find.
Join us every week
Every Wednesday, Marie asks a new Weekly Tokimeki Question and answers it first, and then anyone who wants to can answer alongside her. A few days later we gather some of your replies into a community collage, and at the end of each month we bring everything together here.
Each month the questions focus on one area of life, which makes the practice more concrete and helps you start noticing Tokimeki and applying it in small ways in your day-to-day.
You can find the latest question on Instagram and X, and read more at artoftokimeki.com.