Time for a Change: Declutter and Streamline Your Clothes Closets

The Weekly Tittle is an exercise designed to focus your attention on a specific space, aspect, or challenge of decluttering and organizing your home. We assign a new tittle in each webcast/podcast, then check on your progress the following week.

Come Out of the Closet!

This week’s assignment is to focus on and reduce one category of clothes closet clutter:

• Start by identifying a category of clothing of which you know or suspect you have too much. (If you’re in the 10 percent of our survey respondents with 51 or more pairs of shoes, you might want to start there.)
• Gather all items in the selected category from everywhere that you have them stashed: the main closet, overflow closets, the spare bedroom, dresser drawers, under the bed, and so on.
• Decide on a set of criteria for which items you’ll keep—or alternatively, for which items you’ll discard or donate. For example:
  • Does it fit? or On my current regimen, will it fit again within a reasonable amount of time?
  • Do I still like it? Do I ever wear it? (If the answer to either question is no, reflect on why you don’t like it or wear it.)
  • Is it still in good enough condition to wear?
  • Do I have similar items that I like better and prefer to wear?
  • Do I have multiple, functionally identical items? How many do I need to maintain my typical wardrobe rotation?
• Evaluate the space available and establish at least a rough target for the number of items you plan to keep.
• Assess each item according to the criteria you’ve established and make keep–toss decisions.
• If your keep pile still exceeds the total number of items you decided to keep, make additional passes through the “keep” pile to reduce it even further.

For the full discussion of this week’s tittle, watch the Weekly Tittle segment on YouTube.