Remove what you don’t wear
OK, step one is really looking at your closet as a whole and evaluating what you wear on your regular rotation. Next, take the items that you haven’t worn in a year or more, and take them out of your closet and put ‘em in a pile. Even if it’s that really awesome shirt that you’ll start wearing again as soon as you lose that 10 pounds. And yes I know you have that shirt.., I have the same shirt.
Organize by color, type & pattern
Next, once you have a little more space in your closet, start with your shirts and put all similar colors together. For example, put all of your white shirts together and put all of your blue shirts together. If you have a lot of shirts that have pattern, put all of your pattern stuff together. Put all of your polo shirts together and all of your short sleeve shirts together. Basically, you’re organizing everything by color, type and pattern. Once you have that done, do the same thing with your pants. Put all your dress trousers together, your chinos together and put all your jeans together. If you’ve got different colors of chinos and different washes of denim, group them in order from dark to light.
Look for overlaps
Now, once that’s done, you have a much better look at what you actually have. So… take a look…. what do you see that’s repetitive? For example, how many white shirts do you have? How many do you actually need? How many navy trousers do you have, and how many do you actually need. You can probably start to see where I’m going with this. I understand the need to have a few white shirts if your work uniform requires you to wear white shirts everyday. But the point of doing is this way is to evaluate what you have in this manner, and if you find that you have a lot of repetitive colors and patterns, you can start to eliminate some of the overlap.
Donate or toss
For example, if you’re staring at 4 black polo shirts, my guess is that one or two of them are your favorite and the other two you don’t reach for that often for whatever reason. So why do you need 4 black polo shirts? Keep two and donate the rest. Continue this through your T shirts, sweatshirts, and shoes. Because I’m telling you, there’s a lot of people out there right now that could benefit from the items you no longer use.
Oh, and the pile that you made earlier of the stuff you haven’t worn in a year, get rid of it or donate it. Because let’s be honest, if you haven’t worn it in the last 12 months, you’re not going to wear it so it’s best that you clear that stuff out and make room for items that you actually need and will actually wear.
