TLDR: Everyone experiences a varying degree of stress response when it comes to clutter. But wherever you land on the spectrum, it’s the number of decisions attached to your stuff that often creates the stress.
CAVEAT: You actually do have too many things (we all do!) The problem is that having too many things and having too many decisions aren’t necessarily the same issue.
(As always, find your next step at the end!)
When I think about laundry, I think about disorder.
It’s not because my own laundry baskets are out of control—they aren’t.
It’s that laundry is somehow one of the most basic tasks we deal with regularly and yet also the one that so often trips people up. How is it that such a simple thing wields so much power in our daily lives?
That—that almost crazy notion that inanimate piles of fabric can hold any kind of power at all—is why laundry makes me think about disorder.
Laundry is a perfect example of why we needs good systems.
Laundry is self-contained. As in, you’re probably not finding random dirty clothes in your refrigerator (although if you are finding random clothes in weird places, try giving each person in your household their own basket and putting it wherever they actually get undressed).
But even though laundry can be physically contained, it’s also … sort of infinite. No matter how ‘perfect’ your laundry game is, you will (hopefully) always be wearing clothes and therefore you’ll never actually be able to win.
So, using our simple example of laundry and clothes, let’s talk about:
How Decision Fatigue Actually Happens
It’s Monday morning and you need to decide what to wear for the day. No big deal—your closet is pretty tidy.
So, this morning you have indoor meetings on-camera, then a lunch out with a potential new friend or professional contact, an afternoon kids sports game, and errands on the way home.
So now you’re trying to decide if your ‘good’ top and one of your comfy bottoms is ‘outfit-y’ enough to meet a new person in while you consider which pair of shoes can reasonably walk you through all these different activities.
Now do that again Tuesday.
And Wednesday. Thursday, Friday, and forever.
That’s a lot more decisions than just the one we started with.
(Tip - Categorize your closet by type of activity, not type of clothing, so that the clothes you need are already grouped together.)
It’s easy to underestimate how quickly the number adds up when it comes to daily decisions. And that was just getting dressed.
Recently, I came across an easy-to-visualize way of thinking about decision fatigue from Audrey at Organized Chaos (read her full post here).
Audrey talks about imagining your daily decision making capacity as a jar full of tokens. Imagine that when you wake up, you have a full jar of 100 gorgeous gold coins to be spent as you so decide.
You use tokens for deciding to reach out to that new contact who could really help your career. You use them to decide to have the difficult conversation you’ve been avoiding, to ask for the opportunity you really want … to pursue the idea you've been carrying in your heart for years.
But you also use tokens to decide what to wear, what to eat, and whether to take the freeway or not.
This idea makes it easy to see that if you ‘spend’ your tokens on a bunch of boring, routine, and recurring decisions every day, you’ll have nothing left to spend on creating the life you actually want to be living.
You’ll have nothing left to invest in becoming More.
Audrey’s example really hit home for me. It takes the notion that our decision making capacity shrinks throughout the day and turns it into something very concrete. Let’s keep that jar of tokens in mind as we get back into systems and how we can apply them to make everyday life require fewer decisions.
How Systems Relieve Decision Fatigue
It’s Monday morning (again).
But this time, it doesn’t matter what’s going on today because it’s a Monday in Fall and you’re wearing your Monday outfit, Fall Edition.
See how simple that was?
And I’m not being facetious here—it really can be that simple to save tokens and start freeing up your mental bandwidth. And saving yourself 5-10 minutes each morning saves 25-50 minutes a week. You can use those extra pockets of time in so many little ways.
Or you can simply bask in the breathing room.
(Tip - If you don’t currently have enough bandwidth to create an official ‘capsule wardrobe’, you can still choose outfits for the week on Sunday.)
Now let’s free up some tokens at the end of the day, when those clothes become laundry.
You can read more about laundry systems in my 5 Foundational Systems Every Home Needs post, but essentially my advice to conquer laundry is to choose a system that’s easy for your brain to forget about.
What that means specifically is testing out different ways (One load a day when you brew coffee? Wednesdays and Sundays with phone reminders set? Delegating?) until you find the one that most quickly becomes automatic.
What it also means is considering whether you actually have a laundry problem at all, because you might not.
You might have a volume problem.
Sometimes the system is the problem. Sometimes the volume is the problem. And sometimes it’s both. The trick is to examine your situation objectively.
Reducing the number of clothes (or anything) you own isn't a moral victory. It's simply one way to reduce the number of decisions attached to getting dressed and doing laundry.
I sometimes need a reminder that looking at ‘problems’ in this neutral way is necessary to shift into ‘project mode’ and make real changes. So let this be your reminder, too: you probably need to reduce your overall volume.
Reducing volume reduces how much daily work you have and how many daily decisions you have to make.
That’s why laundry is such a good example of how the order created by systems makes the energy required to build them worth it.
The point of all this laundry talk is really simple: we want to preserve as much of our decision-making energy as possible.
To some, spending time creating home systems sounds boring. To me, it sounds like investing in the kind of home that my family and I love while preserving the energy I need to work consistently toward my greater creative pursuits.
By putting in a little time on the front end, you’re creating something more valuable than time: mental clarity. So the point isn’t the time you saved this week by picking out clothes. It’s something bigger, because it’s something real:
Every decision you eliminate through a system compounds over time into greater mental clarity.
And you can use that mental clarity to do … whatever you want.
HERE’S YOUR NEXT STEP:
Spend 15 minutes reducing the volume in your closet. Don’t put any decluttering ‘rules’ in place—just pull out anything that you think about regularly but never actually choose.
P.S. If you need help creating systems that make your everyday life require less management, join my free Systems Library