This past Friday after work, I spent 10 minutes figuring out what clothes I'll wear for the next 7 weeks.
What this means is that I looked through my closet and organized my clothes into clusters of four outfits per week. Why four? I teach three days a week and dress more formally for those three days. I give myself one "dress-down" day at work. I also dress-down on the weekends. On those days, I grab something from my drawers, not from my closet. So I'm really just picking out the more formal sets of clothes. This set-up gives me structure (on my formal days) and flexibility too.
After bunching the clothes into groups, I linked each group of four outfits with a hair elastic, so I'd see which clothes belong together for the week. If there was an outfit that required an accessory (special stockings or a belt or such), I found that item and hung it on the hangar, too.
Before you think that this is over-the-top OCD behavior, I'll share with you what I've discovered about the advantages of doing this.
The most immediate advantage, and the reason I started organizing my clothes this way, is that picking out clothes calmly and quietly on a tranquil evening saves me a bunch of stress on hectic week-day mornings. Even though I have a good morning routine and my boys know how to make their own breakfast, there is still a lot of last-minute craziness that can lead to "Decision fatigue". I don't want choosing my outfit to be the reason I snap at my sons when they ask whether they're allowed to make pancakes instead of waffles, and whether I have lined paper for their notebook, and what to do about the dog barf in the living room, and whether I'll be free at 6:15 this evening to pick up their friend for a sleep-over.
But I've learned that banding my clothes together has a lot of frugal advantages, too. Like these:
What this means is that I looked through my closet and organized my clothes into clusters of four outfits per week. Why four? I teach three days a week and dress more formally for those three days. I give myself one "dress-down" day at work. I also dress-down on the weekends. On those days, I grab something from my drawers, not from my closet. So I'm really just picking out the more formal sets of clothes. This set-up gives me structure (on my formal days) and flexibility too.
After bunching the clothes into groups, I linked each group of four outfits with a hair elastic, so I'd see which clothes belong together for the week. If there was an outfit that required an accessory (special stockings or a belt or such), I found that item and hung it on the hangar, too.
The most immediate advantage, and the reason I started organizing my clothes this way, is that picking out clothes calmly and quietly on a tranquil evening saves me a bunch of stress on hectic week-day mornings. Even though I have a good morning routine and my boys know how to make their own breakfast, there is still a lot of last-minute craziness that can lead to "Decision fatigue". I don't want choosing my outfit to be the reason I snap at my sons when they ask whether they're allowed to make pancakes instead of waffles, and whether I have lined paper for their notebook, and what to do about the dog barf in the living room, and whether I'll be free at 6:15 this evening to pick up their friend for a sleep-over.
But I've learned that banding my clothes together has a lot of frugal advantages, too. Like these:
- I learned I have a lot of clothes. When I did this the first time one early October, my groupings took me all the way into late November. Who knew? All of a sudden I realized I don't need new outfits as much as I thought. Similarly, the summer outfits I banded together last Friday (September 2) will take me into mid-October. By then, I'll put them all away and get out my cold-weather outfits. This means that for more than three months, I won't wear the same outfit twice. Realizing this cut my personal shopping this past summer down to almost nothing.
- I learned about the redundancies in my clothes. When I pick out my clothes by thinking only "what will I wear today?", I focus on single outfits that I might like. But when I organized ALL my clothes into groups, I was surprised to discover that I had 6 black sweaters. This is because every time I see a black sweater listed at 50¢ at a yard sale, I think, "that would be a good thing to own; it'll go with lots of outfits". Now I know that I already own quite enough black sweaters, thank you.
- I finally decided to get rid of a few of those outfits that seemed like a good idea at the time, but that I just don't like wearing. It's one thing to keep passing over that outfit, saying "not today, but maybe later." But when I admitted that I don't want to wear that outfit even 5 weeks from now, I knew that meant "never". There are some clothes that look good on the hangar but bad on me.
- A surprise discovery was remembering that the opposite can be true: there are some clothes that look bad on the hangar, but good on me. There's a black fitted dress I have -- in spite of my penchant for black sweaters, I really don't wear much black, though. So I avoided that dress for a year or more. But when I finally put that dress in the groupings and wore it, I got a huge number of compliments on it.
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