The Lazy Hanger Trick

As I mentioned in THIS post, last month I gave a talk to the ladies at church about decluttering and organizing as a way to simplify our lives.  Not because I'm an expert (I most certainly am not), but because I have lots of ideas and enjoy trying to be organized.

According to a recent study done by Ikea, America has a clutter problem with almost half of Americans labeling themselves as disorganized.  And we don't need more storage space to solve this problem.  What we need to do is get rid of stuff we aren't using.  Check out this infograph from Ikea to see the cost of clutter and what are some clutter hot spots.

I'm sure most of you have heard of the 80/20 rule.  That is to say we wear 20% of our clothes 80%of the time.  And according to Ikea, 25% of our clothing never gets worn.

One way to figure out what you wear is the hanger trick. 



That is where you turn all of your hangers around and once you wear something you hang it up with the hanger facing the right way.  

source

The original hanger trick takes time.  So I've come up with:

The Lazy Hanger Trick

Instead of taking the time to turn all your hangers around, just get some sort of divider and place it at one end of your closet.  In this case I used two red children's hangers to separate my husbands clothing.

This works even if you separate pants from shirts from dresses - just use multiple dividers.

Once you wear something hang it back up to the other side of the divider.  This way, one side would be clothing worn, and the other side would be clothing not worn.  This is a more visual way to see exactly what you wear, and how it is a small percentage of the clothing you own.

This works for clothing that is stacked on drawers and shelves too.  Just use a piece of paper as a divider.  Place the divider on top and once something is worn, place that on top of the divider.  Then everything below the paper is clothing you don't wear.

After a year or a season, you should get a good idea of what you really wear and everything else can be purged.

So, if you were intimated by the original hanger trick, this lazy way is for you.
Who's with me?  Who's going to find out what you really wear?  And more importantly who's going to purge what you don't wear?  

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