One chore I hate – but not as much as I hate doing the dishes – is sorting laundry. It takes so long. And it’s so boring.
I used to try and sort as efficiently as possible. Because surely that would mean I would spend less time doing it. So I would sort laundry into all of the different piles and categories it needed to be in all at once.
This would lead to be frequently having a brain freeze and spending 2 or 3 seconds mentally trying to work out whether a sock was a shirt or pants before remembering I had a socks pile.
I’ve discovered that it’s actually faster – and even more fun – to sort in a way which seems terribly inefficient at first glance.
The idea is that I am never sorting into more than two categories at a time. I take one pile of laundry and split it into two piles.
Clothes or Not Clothes?
Kid Clothes or Adult Clothes?
My Clothes or Husband’s Clothes?
Hang in Wardrobe or put on the shelving unit?
Put on a shelf or in a basket?
And so on and so on. I tried making a flow chart to illustrate this but it quickly got really REALLY big because it keeps going until every pile contains just the one kind of thing that are all stored together.
One important thing is that I don’t fold or even turn things the right way around. It’s just sorting – either THIS or THAT. Some branches of the “tree” are much shorter than others.
Once everything is sorted then I turn each thing in each pile the right way around. Then I fold each pile.
This way I’m doing the same thing over and over a few times in a row rather than having to switch gears to fold a shirt and then fold a pair of pants.
And even though when I’m sorting I am handling the same items over and over and over again as I keep sorting and dividing these piles of clothes… it ends up being SO much quicker than if I tried to divide everything up all at once… because I don’t get those moments of brain freeze. And it’s not so intolerably tedious and boring that I just HAVE to do something else and leave it another month.
What’s your second-least favourite chore? Is there a way you can make it easier on your brain even if it seems more inefficient at first?