FROM TIME TO time, all of us can be guilty of throwing our clothes into the wardrobe or a chest of drawers and simply hoping they’ll organise themselves.

However, we all know that this is pretty much the perfect way to lose track of our favourite items, spending months at a time wondering where our favourite shirts, skirts, jeans, jumpers and dresses have gone. 

Putting some order in your wardrobe is a great step toward taking control of your life, and will help you on a day-to-day level when it comes to planning your outfits. Taking the stress out of your wardrobe is the kind of everyday task that can make a significant improvement to your quality of life. 

Today, we’re looking at hacks and tips for how you can make organising your wardrobe easier. 

Sort it out the right way

When it comes to sorting the wardrobe into different categories, some people choose to organise by colour, or strictly by ‘type’ of clothing — shirts with shirts, pants with pants, etc.

However, a wiser way to go about laying out your wardrobe is to keep the things that you wear often together. Your rotation of office clothes, for example, should be dead-centre in your wardrobe at eye level. Beyond that, you should maintain a section for your favourite casual wear, weekend-wear and your best “going out” clothes. That way, you know exactly where to start when you’re deciding on an outfit. 

Once you’ve divided your wardrobe into sections, then you can coordinate by colour or style, but the number one way to organise is by frequency. 

Save yourself some space

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If you’ve got an overcrowded wardrobe, it’s going to be much more difficult to get to the clothes you want, or even know exactly what options you’ve got in front of you. We have two tips for how you can improve this situation without needing to throw out any clothes.

The first is to use slim, wire hangers that take up as little space as possible. The second tip is to install more than one rack in your wardrobe to optimise the space you have. Keep your most frequently used outfits and items on the lower rack while putting special occasion clothing, such as heavy winter clothes and wedding outfits, on the top rack. 

However, you can also save some space by taking stock of which clothes you no longer wear. If you haven’t worn a certain item in a year or more, it might be time to donate it to the charity shop or a worthy cause.

More than the rack

Oftentimes, we don’t do enough to fully optimise the space in our wardrobes. For example, installing a shoe rack at the bottom of the wardrobe, or a sliding basket for things like t-shirts, can be a real space-saver. 

Other options to make more of the space are soft storage boxes, available from stores like IKEA, which are malleable and can be slotted into the bottom of a wardrobe to hold things like socks, underwear and other small, loose items. Keeping everything together in your wardrobe is efficient for when you don’t want to lose too much time getting ready, and you don’t need to sacrifice space for it.