Clothing you don’t wear frequently can fill up your closet while giving you the unpleasant feeling that you don’t have anything to wear. This leads to overbuying, which leads to a cluttered closet. The solution is to figure out how frequently you wear each item, but trying to remember what you wore weeks ago—or even writing down your daily wardrobe selection—is a huge time waster. Fortunately, there’s a simple solution.
Instead of arranging your clothing by type or by color, for the duration of this test, you’ll arrange it by date of wearing. When you rehang an item of clothing, put it on the most accessible end of the closet rod. The next item worn goes next to it, and so on. Soon you’ll see what you wear frequently, and what is simply taking up space and collecting dust in your closet.
You can also use this trick to avoid over-wearing an item, as you’ll be able to see what you’ve worn recently. Clothes that aren’t getting worn languish on the end of the closet rod, while the favorites keep ending up at the near end. You may have some items taking up closet space that no longer work for you—or that simply need to go into seasonal storage.
Once you know how often you wear each item, you can easily decide if there are pieces that no longer deserve to be in your closet.
