In an effort to simplify my clothing routine and reduce our household waste this year, I’ve been working on different ways change our laundry. We’d already reduced our laundry routine a lot in the past through making our own laundry detergent, ditching dryer sheets, and limiting the amount of clothing we buy/wear. Something new I’ve been trying this year involves laundry planning though.

I know that planning your laundry sounds kind of crazy, but hear me out because it has actually been great! The biggest thing that I do to plan out our laundry is laying out my clothing for the week every Sunday (note: we do laundry on the weekends, so everything is always clean on Sunday nights). On Sunday nights, I look through my wardrobe and pick out my five work outfits for the week. However, instead of just picking five random things. I choose clothing items that are versatile and can be worn with multiple outfits (I might choose a sweater that goes with two different shirts, or only pick out a couple of pairs of pants and wear them multiple days) and are similar colors. Planning your clothing to be similar colors is huge here.

You see, my laundry for this particular week is basically is all blue or black. This greatly reduces the amount of loads of laundry I need to do. Other weeks I might go with more reds and browns in my wardrobe or more yellows and whites. The biggest thing in consistency in color though. I’ve found that it has simplified my laundry routine a ton. Cody pretty much only wears dark colored clothing and I tend to wear dark pants or leggings for work, so we always have a load of darks. Then, I can just have one other load of colored items based on what I wore for the week. It really simplifies the whole routine from start to finish, even the sorting of the weekly laundry when it is time to wash is way quicker.

If you’re looking to simplify your laundry routine, I highly recommend trying this out for a couple weeks and see if it works for you!