A lot of people are caught in the cycle of wearing every single article of clothing they own until everything is dirty, and then they have to do nine loads of laundry. But few people can manage to do nine loads of laundry at once, at least few people can manage to do nine loads, then fold, sort, iron, and otherwise take care of the clean clothes. So it ends up only half done, and quickly turns into a real mess.

This is a problem caused by two things, being disorganized, and having a wardrobe that is unmanageably large. Now you and I both know that it is hard for a disorganized person to magically become organized, but it is easy for a huge wardrobe to magically become small.

Tools needed

What we are going to do here is to pare your working wardrobe down to a more manageable size. It is as difficult to maintain a huge wardrobe as it is to maintain half a dozen cars. Few people own six cars, but many, many people have 17 pairs of identical khaki pants.

Don't get scared, we aren't throwing anything away here, all we are doing is moving that excess clothing into a reserve, away from the main wardrobe.

The first thing you should do is this. Take out all your damaged clothing, you know that shirt with the hole in it, the pants that are missing the button, that jacket with the broken zipper. The fact is that you haven't fixed them yet, you probably won't fix them in the future either. Toss those in the box first, or for the more daring, toss them in the trash (don't give this mess to charity, the signal to noise ratio is already low enough at the thrift store as it is).

Ok, good, now that all the damaged clothing is out of the way it is time to move on to the next category, which is clothes you hate. If you are anything like me (and I know you are), then you have clothes that you really dislike, but that you wear anyway. Take each and every one of those items and drop them in the box, or if you are more daring go ahead and give them to the thrift store.

By the time I was at this step I had already reduced my wardrobe by half, but it is time to keep going. The next thing we are going to look at is high maintenance items. Mostly these are going to be dry clean only items or things like those pants that take 20 minutes to iron. Make a decision about each one of these individually. I personally ended up putting them all in the box except for one suit.

Now for the final category, duplicates. Guess what, you aren't Albert Einstein, you don't need 8 pairs of identical tan pants, 11 pairs of jeans, and so on. This tends to be a larger problem with guys then it is with girls, as womens fashion is a lot more diverse. I suggest keeping no more than 2 duplicate items in your active wardrobe. For example, I cut my unbelievable stash of 21 pair of tan and khaki pants down to 2 pairs (just imagine getting all these dirty and needing to iron all of them). I likewise went down to 2 pair of jeans, and a single pair of black pants (I go months withour wearing black pants, no reason to babysit more than one pair). I also cut down on the general number of sweaters and t-shirts. You should use your best judgement when it comes to socks and underwear. I personally kept it all active, but only because I don't fold or sort mine, I just toss it all in the drawer.

The final step is to put away that box or boxes someone out of the way, somewhere that you aren't tempted to go fishing things out of it all the time.

Now that we are finished doing that you will find that your wardrobe is much easier to manage, and that you are never stuck wearing damaged clothes, or clothes you hate. You can replace damaged or worn out clothing out of your reserve, or occasionally simply rotate some stuff into it so that the reserve clothing isn't forgotten.