ADHD friends, how do you organize your clothes?
I'm failing. My usual tricks aren't working and I don't know what to do with my clothes anymore.
One of my ADHD symptoms is that needs to see everything. My "pantry" is open shelves in my kitchen. Everything in the fridge is up near the front of the shelves. I have a giant desk so I can spread out when I'm working. I need to see it all at all times.
So the issue becomes, how do I do that with clothes. My alligator brain wants them all over the floor so I can see everything. That's not gonna work lol. I used to be good with a closet with no doors, but my new apartment isn't laid out in a way I can do that.
Does anyone have any interesting clothes storage advice? The clutter is stressing me out, so I need to figure out whatever my new system is going to be.
I use piles. There's the clean pile, the dirty pile, and the multiple-wear pile, for sweaters and pants and stuff.
I upgraded my pile system a couple of years back by adding a command hook to the wall above my "clothing pile area" for my jeans, which are the extent of my multiple-wear pile.
I contain my "piles" in folding mesh pop-up hampers which are see through enough for me. They wear out eventually, but since they mostly don't move (or "pop down") I get extra life after the wire starts to poke through. FWIW I'm pretty sure the quality is better from Bed Bath & Beyond than say Walmart, but YMMV.
Edit: I left out something which I just now remembered was more germane when I had a more varied, uh, personal presentation. Clothe selection (particularly non-dress shirts) was a matter of dumping the appropriate bin on the bed and then shoveling it all back in (usually right before bed). Dress shirts on hangers, organized using a system no one could understand but me. In the last limited closet space place I lived I had a garment rack.
I, too, struggle with 'out of sight, literally never existed to me' ADHD.
I am getting some positive results now with a bookcase- pants & skirts folded on lower shelf, tees higher, and a basket for socks & underwear on the bottom. Rotate summer/winter stuff, closet for rare wear. I also use a basket for semi clean stuff I'll wear again, but that's not part of the official plan lol.
I'm gonna lurk here for ideas.
I used to abide by the "pile" system, but then I found this great life-hack:
Step 1: Get a job-job
Step 2: Realise your wardrobe is 99.5% 10 year old H&M cheapware
Step 3: Spend a, frankly, uncomfortable amount of money updating your wardrobe so that you no longer look like an overgrown 13 year old
Step 4: Be so conscious of every item of clothing that you own now that you guilt-buy nice hangers and put them nice 'dry cleaning" bags and be anxious every time you sneeze near them for fear of your ADHD clumsy ass ruining your nice expensive clothes
Ta-da! You've cured yourself of pile-ification, and gained nice-ass-clothes anxiety instead!
Oh good I'm not the only one.
Quality instead of quantity. I got a really great shirt at Target that I got a lot of praise for, my neurodivergence makes dressing a problem so this was an unusual event. I got on Target’s web site and bought 6 other shirts of the same design with similar prints. I am lucky enough to have two open closets, one with summer clothes and one with winter clothes, it sure makes it easy to have something I can grab that I know will be good without a lot of thinking.
Floordrobe
Once a week or so I hang up shirts, fold t-shirts, organise socks, and frown in confusion at the kid's clothes mysteriously mixed in with mine. Then, about 0.001 nanoseconds later, with no input from me, every article I'd organised and put away has already found itself back on the floordrobe.
Before I met my wife, it was definitely a heavy use of the pile method until I became motivated enough to put them away. A clean pile and a dirty hamper.
After meeting my wife? I use the activity of putting clothes away as a joint exercise... so basically peer pressure. I'll even do it by myself sometimes, if only to avoid the side eye of judgement
I am so, so relieved that so many of my fellow ADHD-ers are using the pile system.
I have seasonal piles! AKA summer stuff moves to the bottom during winter and vice versa. I do keep to a very limited color palette that allows for pretty nearly anything to go with anything I grab out of the pile. Even when I had a full closet and everything hung up neatly, I found myself just opening the one closet door and grabbing from the same ~9 inches of hanger space.
Out of sight, out of mind is a serious problem for me.
Mine are on the floor, so I have no room to talk.
But they're supposed to be on hangars. You can put a clothes hanger of arbitrary length on any wall.
All my T shirts are the same so they go folded in piles by color and jackets and button downs go on hangars.
And then there's a shelf above the hangers where my technical clothes are spread out in a mess...
I'm still working on the stuff that goes in drawers, but for things that don't really need folded like underwear, socks, sweatpants, and pajamas, we just dump them all into these wire baskets. With the socks we fold them military style first so pairs stay together.
Here's a photo of this portion of our closet! It's the only part we've actually got anything organized in yet, though, so I'll definitely be reading other comments in this thread to steal some advice.
I know K.C. Davis on tiktok does this for even more of her family's clothes, basically anything that isn't fancy. But unfortunately when I designed this ikea closet I put drawers in the other half rather than bins.
I went a different route and used the Pareto principle, e.g., 20% of the stuff I had I wore 80% of the time, so I donated most of that 80%. Having less stuff meant it was easier to see it all.
I also just made my clothing...boring? E.g., All black socks/underwear (sock matching is a breeze) and mainly just T-Shirts and pants and everything goes with everything. Less need to see everything this way as I could just blindly grab a T-shirt/pants (and optionally a button down shirt) and be good to go.
My kid uses two laundry baskets -- one for clean and one for dirty. As everything they wear fits in one basket, they can easily see what they have.
And maybe something like this 5 layer hanger would help save space but allow you to see each item? (Edit to add, I don't recommend the hanger as I've never used it -- just searched and thought it may be useful for you.)
I'm male, for reference. I have a two-piece ikea closet.
This is what I do for my underwear, shorts, and pants. I think it does a good job of saving space so I can fit everything together and I can still see what colors things are. I haven't tried this with my shirts because I feel like I have too many plus I want to be able to see what's on my t-shirts so that I can think about what I want to wear, so my shirts drawer looks more like this. I did just find this little DIY graphic for an interesting way to fold and store shirts which I might try.
That last link is how I fold my t shirts. Not only do you not have to keep remaking the pile every time you want to wear a shirt in the middle of it, but with the shirts folded this way you can see a bit of the design and know at a glance all clean shirts you have.
That's the Marie Kondo style of folding, and I've used it for a number of years. The idea is to make straight edges while folding, then stack your clothes vertically. It's very effective for being able to see all of your clothes at once, which you lose when making piles. I think it's exactly what OP is asking for.
Note that this can lead to wrinkles though, depending on how tightly you fold. And it does take a little longer than traditional folds.
I did a lot better with actually folding my laundry before I got a washer/dryer.
I think I need to make my laundry too obnoxious to ignore, so I have to deal with it to get it out of my way. Maybe just dump it straight from the dryer onto my desk. And I kinda want to hang everything up in my closet and have only a sock/underwear/sleepwear drawer.
Plastic crates used anywhere clothes might normally pile up — separate containers for clean, dirty, and lightly used. I use a similar approach for most rooms, making sure I have space to dump things to deal with later without covering the floor or desk or other space I need to be able to use.
Things that I don’t wear are hung up or stored in a dresser. Stuff that I wear regularly gets rotated between the clean laundry bag and the dirty laundry bag but hampers would work perfectly fine. It’s a bit more contained than piles while still having a similar functionality.
A drawer for t-shirts. A drawer for socks. A drawer for underwear.
Jeans get folded into one stack on a shelf in the closet. Slacks folded into another stack. Shorts or sweats (depending on the season) go in a third.
Button-down shirts get hung up in the closet.
Everything gets sorted into those spots, and the spots don't change. I always know where to go for what I need. This also gives me the benefit of having my clothes not be wrinkled.
That said, within those categories there is no rhyme or reason. If I want something specific and it doesn't stand out, then it requires digging around.
My dryer plays a song when it's finished, and I do my best to fold the clothes right there in the laundry room before taking them to my room. If I don't do it right away then those clothes will stay in there for days until it's time to wash another load. I drop dirty clothes wherever I take them off, all throughout the house. Luckily the mess perturbs me, and it's a good visual reminder, so it doesn't take too long for it to get to a point that spurs me on a cleaning spree.
Funny story, my wife and I just moved recently from an apartment to a house. We left early in the month so as to give ourselves plenty of time with the move. We got mostly settled into the new place pretty quickly with just some minor things to take care of at the old place. For some reason though, we couldn't find where all our socks went. Looked high and low in all the boxes in the new place, but it's like they just disappeared into the ether. Old place was empty sans cleaning supplies, so it was a real head scratcher. I end up doing a final walkthrough before handing the keys over, checking every cupboard, closet, nook, and cranny. Lo and behold, I open the dryer on a whim and find an entire load forgotten about for nearly a month. Just ADHD things.
You all make me feel a lot better about my piles/floorsrobe. I appreciate it!
I like the idea of the clean and dirty hamper and/or plastic tubs. That makes me feel like the piles wouldn't be so out of control. I really need to find that executive function to put my winter clothes away. June gloom has been over for a month! Lol
I have some ideas to figure out how to implement in my studio apartment. Thanks y'all!
The amount of "piles" comments on here is shocking.
I did piles until recently... Now I hang everything I can (basically a no doors closet situation) and have one drawer for underwear/socks and one for pants/shorts. I still have a pile of shame in my laundry room though.
I wish I could take the doors off this closet. That was my go to solution for a long time. This closet has large mirrored doors and I just don't have anywhere to store them safely if I take them off.
so when I moved in I organised by clothing type in my wardrobe and drawers then about a week later I changed my system up and decided to go with clean pile and dirty pile. It works it works
At least before I got married. She now manages the far more complicated textile logistics (like not just running everything in one big load), although I make sure to do my part by actually doing my share of the washing, just with her handling organizing it.
If I had laundry in my apartment this would totally be my system!