Closet Organization Guide

There are many telltale signs that tell us it’s time to start organizing our closets. These include when we struggle to find things we need, when it’s filled with clothes we no longer wear, and when it generally overflows to the point where we could use the extra space.

The benefits of organizing and simplifying your closet are endless. For starters, a simplified closet allows us to find things more easily and make fewer decisions between outfits, which in turn allows us to get dressed faster. Additionally, the process of organizing our closets will likely lead us to purge clothes that don’t make us look or feel our best.

In this article, we discuss 5 basic tips that can help us with meaningful and efficient closet organization:

Closet Organization
1: Consider fit and comfort

2: Consider your personal style (either current or aspirational)

3: Sweep the floor of clothes that have not been worn in 6 months or more

4: Wear items you don’t normally wear; and

5: Pre-plan where unneeded clothes will go

1: Consider fit and comfort
First and foremost, everything in our closet should make us feel good and should be comfortable to wear.

If something doesn’t fit our body and doesn’t make us feel comfortable, then it’s probably time to say goodbye to it for good. For those of us who may tell ourselves “one day I’ll fit into this” (although some may find this motivating), we should remind ourselves that we don’t have to change our bodies to fit our clothes, instead, we should change our clothes to fit our bodies.

2: Consider your personal style (both current and future)
When evaluating our current closet, we may want to ask ourselves if certain items reflect our current style. Or, we may have a style or aesthetic that we want to achieve for ourselves – if this is the case, removing items from our closet that don’t reflect this style is the perfect starting point for building our dream closet.

3: If it hasn’t been worn in over 6 months, get rid of it
Disclaimer: For the purposes of this, we’re not referring to seasonal or occasion-specific clothing.

For clothes that we haven’t worn (let alone touched) in over six months, we should seriously consider removing them from our closets. This especially includes clothes that still have tags on them – frankly, there’s a reason we haven’t worn these items yet. It’s time to say goodbye.

4: Wear clothes you don’t wear often
If we come across items that we rarely wear but still want to keep them (again, except for specific occasions or seasonal outfits), a smart move to help us make a decision is to plan to wear the item for a week.

If we find it hard to pair the item with other pieces in our closet, then maybe that’s a sign to get rid of it.

If the piece can be styled, then when we wear it we can notice and consider how we look and feel in it. If we don’t like the way we look and/or feel in the outfit, that’s our signal to break up.

5: Knowing ahead of time where unwanted items will go
The fear or anxiety of not knowing where unwanted clothes will go can be a major mental block to organizing your closet. Therefore, if we think about where our unwanted clothes will go before we start organizing, we can better organize ourselves and set aside some proper time to do so without interruption.

Whether it’s reselling our items, donating them to charities or thrift stores, or simply gifting them to friends and family, the feeling of simply passing on unwanted items to their designated new home can be incredibly satisfying and perhaps even fulfilling!