It is Day 9! You have made through 9 days of the 10 Day Organizing Challenge! Every day for 10 days we are tackling a different space for 10 minutes of focused organizing!
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Today we are organizing in the closet. Pick any closet in your home: your clothes closet, coat closet, or a kids closet.
Choose a small area within the closet to focus on, like a shelf of the closet or a drawer in your dresser. Another option is to focus on one type of clothing item, like pants, tops, workout clothes, or socks.
Let’s Get Started
- Grab your materials – trash, donation box, notepad/pen, dust cloth, optional: containers
- Set your timer for 10 Minutes
- Go!
Step 1: Whichever area or type of clothing you’ve chosen, begin sorting one item at a time. As you sort, repeat the #1 question:
Do I wear this?
As you are organizing, there are always multiple decisions that can wear you out mentally. This is especially true of longer organizing projects. But even for your 10 minute organizing session, having pre-decided answers to a few key questions can help spare you some mental fatigue and keep you pushing through until the end of the project.
You may like the item, but do you actually wear it? If you don’t wear it, why are you hanging on to it?
To keep you focused during the organizing process, we love a decision tree or flow chart. I made one for processing kid’s paper in episode 5.
For clothing, we turn to the organizing master, Peter Walsh, who we interview in Ep 26, Peter Walsh Helps A to B Get Organized.
The Decision Tree we mentioned is found in Peter Walsh’s It’s All Too Much Workbook, which coordinates with his book, It’s All Too Much. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find an online version to link to, but we highly recommend his books.
Here is a similar flow chart to follow from Vogue’s website, to keep in mind as you work through your 10 minute organizing session.
Step 2: Sort clothes into 4 piles:
1. Keep
Items you love and wear and feel great in.
2. Store
Create a space for out of season or special occasion clothes. It could be under the bed, on a shelf in the top of your closet, or in a hanging garment bag.
3. Trash
Throw out worn out items, and any stained or damaged clothes.
Unless you are going to mend the clothes or soak the stain this week, it is time to say goodbye. How long have you been meaning to take care of it? If you are really going to take care of it, add it to your calendar, but don’t let it wait around for another month!
4. Donate
Many types of items fall under the donation category:
- Clothes you don’t like anymore, this even applies to clothes you got for a great price!
Donate these so someone else can find it and enjoy it.
- Clothes that don’t fit or are uncomfortable
If it’s too tight, scratchy, not flattering… whatever the reason, it just doesn’t work. You may even put it on every now and then only to remember why you don’t wear it– it is time to say goodbye.
- Guilt-inducing items
This excuse is also disguised as “but this is a perfectly good_____ (Insert items name)”. Why is it so easy to say “surround yourself with only items you love”, but so hard to put into practice?
Nobody wants to be greeted with guilt when they open their closet! It is time to let those items go. If you feel guilty that you only wore it once (or not at all) or you spent too much money on it, it is time to forgive yourself. Donate it so it can be used by someone else before the style becomes obsolete.
Why don’t we trash/donate these unloved item right away? Is it because we spent good money on it? We feel guilty for being so wasteful or picky? We think that next time we put it on or use it will be different?
Now I am not saying throw away all the stuff you have and go out and buy the best on the market. But if you have duplicates of an item or you just don’t use it, let’s say goodbye and give it a better home.
You can slowly work on building up your closet with only items you love and feel good in.
It might sound simple enough, but it is truly time to be honest and pass your unloved clothes on to someone who will actually wear and love it. And that means stop holding on to items taking up space and energy in your closet!
Step 3: Return the keepers back into the space. Add containers as dividers, if necessary, to corral like items together. Note any future tasks on your to-do list along with any clothing items to purchase soon.
Quick Tip
One last quick tip before we go. If you happened to have a lot of laundry in the hamper, the items you tend to wear most will be in the wash. The items left hanging the closet, have not been wore recently, for whatever reason and can be a great place to start.
If you have ever heard the statistics, you only wear 20% of what you own. If you let your laundry pile up, you’ll be left with 80% of clothes you hardly ever wear waiting for you in your closet. This is also a great starting point for older children who are planning their own outfits.
We Did It!
I worked on my daughter’s drawers. In the before picture you can see all the clothes that were no longer fitting in the drawers because they needed to be organized!
Many of these items she didn’t like anyway so she would pull them out of her drawer to get to what she really wanted to wear. It was time to say goodbye to the clothes she wouldn’t wear because she had enough clothes that she liked. It helps having 2 older sisters.
The after makes me wonder why I didn’t do this sooner!! I even took a few minutes beyond the prescribed 10 minutes to add labels. When the drawers are in the dresser, you don’t see the labels but when you need it, the labels are reminding you where the items belong.
Way to go tackling your closet, even if it is just a small drawer! If you need a little more inspiration, take a listen to Ep 8 Closet Clean Out and here are a few purging excuses I’ve covered in the past.
Hey, 1 more day left!! We want to celebrate Day 9 of the challenge with you, so check in with us! Let us know how it went!
We welcome all updates, before and after pics, or even questions that came up for you as you started the project. Tag us on Instagram @AtoB podcast or Facebook. Or send us an email Hello @ AtoBpodcast.com.
Enjoying the podcast? Please head to iTunes and leave us a rating and review. It helps us to get your feedback, and helps others to find the show. Also, it is not too late to invite a friend to the 10 Day Challenge!
Did you Miss a Day?
- Day 1 Fridge
- Day 2 Cluttered Drawer
- Day 3 Mail
- Day 4 Home Office
- Day 5 Flat Surface
- Day 6 To-Do List
- Day 7 Books
- Day 8 Bathroom
