3. DIVIDE REMAINING ITEMS

You should now be left with substantially fewer clothes than when you started (if you have more clothes, then the laws of physics apparently do not apply to your closet), so you are now ready to begin sorting. So turn on some music and start sorting your way through your remaining possessions. If there is a fun part to organizing a closet (and that's debatable), this would be it. To make the process easier, try to divide your items into four categories:

The Season Category
The Type Category
The Use Category
The "What the Hell Is This?" Category

The Season Category

The first thing you should do is separate all of your clothes into three categories:

  • Summer
  • Winter
  • Spring/Autumn

You are sorting purely for functionality - winter stuff will include your heavy jackets, summer stuff will include swimsuits.

If you have the room at home, take out-of-season garments and put them in clear bins or garment bags. Be sure to put some cedar in with your clothes. Cedar stinks but it does keep away moths and besides, you can always wash your stuff to get the smell out. If you have a little extra money and are really at a loss for storage space, you can always store your items at a dry cleaners. Most will do this for the cost of dry cleaning but its best to call ahead to make sure of the store's policy.

The Type Category

Start by getting all of your professional clothes together. You know, the suits with sleeves long enough to cover up your tribute tattoo to Britney Spears. Don't forget to include any outfits you might wear on an office casual day. This will make getting dressed in the morning so easy that you'll be able to hit your sleep button five times instead of four. The next type of clothing you'll want to separate is special occasion outfits. By this point you should have lost the lime green tux, so this pile should be pretty easy to manage. The last pile to organize is your casual stuff. These items range from your weekend wear to stuff only your dog should ever see you in.

The Use Category

Now look at your three neat piles and decide how often you wear each piece. This is going to seem unbelievably anal, but believe us it works. Take your three piles of clothing and divide each pile into common-wear and infrequent-wear clothing.

The "What The Hell Is This?" Category

So you've followed all the steps and you're now left with a pile of odds and ends that don't belong anywhere. We'll chalk these items up as accessories. Chances are these items are a mixture of shoes, belts, scarves and suspenders. Divide this stuff up by what part of the body they apply to. It won't be perfect but it will eliminate clutter in the long run.