Inverting my closet

So I was putting my clothes from the laundry basket back into my closet just now and I began wondering how I could better optimize my closet layout.  There are three* main problems.

1. Too many clothes
2. Many clothes not being worn
3. Some clothes are on hangars, some in bins and some on a shelf, so the new system would have to work within those constraints**

Solution : Closet Inversion (or 1/closet )

So, I figured that I’d follow the age old tradition of "If you haven’t worn it in 1 year, you must throw it out".  In my case, throwing it out meant giving it to Erika’s cousin.  But how would I mark the clothing in a way that was easy and that would let me know that I hadn’t worn an item in over a year?  Simple. 

1. Write today’s date on a post-it note (with the year!) and post it somewhere in your closet. 
2. Since I like my hangars all lined up with the open-ends pointing into the closet, I took all my clothes and turned the hangars around.   Now all the hangars had the open-end pointing outwards.
3. I took all my clothing on the shelfs, and also reversed them.  So before if I had my jeans all lined up with the folds pointing outwards, now they were pointing inwards.
4. The closet is now ready.  Now everytime I wear something, when I put it back, I put the hangar in the regular way (open-end towards the inside), or put my jeans back with the fold towards the outside.
5. In one year (you have the date on the post-it note remember!), examine the closet.  For every item that has the hangar inverted, or fold inverted (for things on the shelf), toss it.  You haven’t worn it in a year!

This system has the nice property that, when you put things back into the closet, you put them back in in the way you are used to.  The only pre-think you need is to set-up the closet in the first place.  The downside is that if you start now, you won’t start getting rid of any clothes until a year out.

*For those who know me, know that I rigorously follow the McKinsey three model (I made up this name).  In this model, all data is represented in groups of three after taking a course on presentations and finding out that McKinsey does this.

**This solution does not work for the items in the bins like socks, underwear and pyjamas.  Instead, I use the relatively populary "If it has a rip in it, throw it out" system.  This means I have lots of socks, underwear and pyjamas in relation to other clothing.