Seasonal Hanger Exercise
Seasonal Hanger Exercise? Yes! You can organize your clothes closet with this easy exercise.
Time to swap your hangers! At the beginning of the season turn your hangers in the opposite direction.
Normally you hang your clothes hangers forward on the rod. Now I’d like you to hang them backward.
As you wear a piece of clothing, you remove it from the rod, you wear it, you launder it, and then rehang your clothing on the hanger facing in the correct forward position on the rod. Overall this is a great way to purge your closet. You can obviously see what items of clothing you wore most often and those that weren’t worn at all. But be honest with yourselves. If you didn’t wear it get rid of it!
What do you think of this seasonal hanger exercise?
Finally, do you need more ideas to get your closet organized? Read some of our past posts on the subject:
10 Quick Questions to an Organized Closet
7 Awesome Ways to Sell Your Stuff
The Ten Commandments of Hanging
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Janet Schiesl
Janet has been organizing since 2005. She is a Certified Professional Organizer and the owner of Basic Organization.
She loves using her background as a space planner to challenge her clients to look at their space differently. She leads the team in large projects and works one-on-one with clients to help the process move quickly and comfortably. Call her crazy, but she loves to work with paper, to purge what is not needed and to create filing systems that work for each individual client.
Janet is a Past Board Member of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals and a Past President of the Washington DC Chapter of NAPO were she has been named Organizer of the Year and Volunteer of the Year.
Janet Schiesl
Janet has been organizing since 2005. She is a Certified Professional Organizer and the owner of Basic Organization.
She loves using her background as a space planner to challenge her clients to look at their space differently. She leads the team in large projects and works one-on-one with clients to help the process move quickly and comfortably. Call her crazy, but she loves to work with paper, to purge what is not needed and to create filing systems that work for each individual client.
Janet is a Past Board Member of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals and a Past President of the Washington DC Chapter of NAPO were she has been named Organizer of the Year and Volunteer of the Year.
[…] Organize Your Closet with the Seasonal Hanger Exercise […]
I’ve heard of this trick before. I think it’s a great idea for those who really aren’t sure what they are wearing. I do have some items that I don’t wear in any given year, but which I do wear in others.
Generally, I wear the same 20% of my clothes like everyone else LOL!
Me too. So this exercise helps me to determine what I can give away.
I’ve always been intrigued by this method, and it works well if people have rounded rods, so that backward-hanging items can be removed, hanger-and-all, and then the empty hanger can be returned to what I call the “hanger hangar” where all empty hangers live until the needed.
The problem is when clients have the weird grid-style plastic-coated non-rod racks. It’s so hard to get a backward-facing hanger in and out. For that, we sometimes try a variation on the theme, and move already-worn clothing to the opposite end of the section. So, if the left-most section is blouses, each laundered blouse is returned at the far right of the blouse section. If someone is paying attention to what they wear (or if we’ve taken a photo at the start of the season), we can see what went un-worn. Of course, this doesn’t work if people organize by color within category.
I love creative ideas like the hanger trick for helping people come to decisions with “data” points they may not realize they can collect.
I am so surprised at how this exercise works. I love it! It is so doable for our clients – no pressure to get rid of things right now.
I’ve heard of this before, but it doesn’t really appeal to me. I think seeing all those hangers lined up differently would make me antsy! I’d be more inclined to put stuff I’ve been wearing at one end, then I can review the stuff at the other end when it’s time to change seasons.
Your idea was mentioned by others. I think it’s a good option.