Once and Done: Organizing Your T-Shirts

Courtesy of pfctdayeliseMost men have a limited amount of closet or drawer space to devote to clothes. Most men have even less tolerance for organizing their clothes than they do closet space. If that’s true for you, consider this: how often do you go digging through your dresser or closet for that particular t-shirt you want to wear? How long does it take? How much of a mess do you make when trying to find it? You probably grumbled a mental answer to one or more of these questions, so now I have your attention. I’m going to propose several different approaches to organizing your t-shirts, and the beauty of the whole thing is this—once you put in the organization time and stick to the system, you’re done. That’s it. No more fruitless searching, time wasting or mess making. You have more important things to worry about than where your favorite t-shirt is located.

Dresser

Do you use a dresser for t-shirt storage? If so, then try this method—fold them and arrange them vertically. Don’t stack them on top of one another, put them in the drawer like you’d put files in a file cabinet. This way you can at least see what color it is and see part of what’s printed on the shirt. Using just this method and no further organizational tactics, you can pluck the shirt out of its spot in the drawer without ruffling or displacing any of your other t-shirts. Garments can be separated with several different kinds of dividers (again, like a file cabinet) if you’re sorting them by something other than color. You can use wood, cardboard or anything else you can think of as long as it fits in your drawer. Check out this <a href=" http://www.darkroomanddearly.com/2012/03/diy-organized-t-shirt-drawers.html">site</a> for a good folding tutorial and an example of what I mean.

Closet

If you’re hanging all of your t-shirts in a closet then you’re in pretty good shape already. It’s a pretty easy thing to arrange things how you want in a closet, but there are some inherent shortcomings without organization—you might suffer a large amount of trudging through hanger after hanger of shirts that you don’t want if you’re not organized. No matter how you organize your t-shirts (which we’ll get to momentarily), make sure they’re sectioned away from jackets, polos, flannels, button-ups or anything else that might be hanging in your closet. If you’re organizing by something other than color or an alphabetical method, trying using a different color clothes hanger for each section—black and white work just fine. As with the dresser method, use a divider to separate each section. A bright colored hanger or two in between each division is probably satisfactory, but you can certainly get more creative than that.

Situation

Let’s tackle the most abstract organization method first—situation. With this method, you’ll organize your t-shirts by the type of situation you’ll wear them in. For instance, you might have one category for shirts you’ll wear to a barbecue with the in-laws, one category for shirts you’ll wear to the bar and one category for shirts you’ll wear to watch a baseball game at a buddy’s house. By now you should be at a stage in your life where you admit that your t-shirt choice depends on the situation and you choose somewhat carefully—no more “I just throw on whatever’s clean and go out the door.” If you use this method, make sure you organize by color within each section. Also, keep the shirts you wear more frequently toward the front so they’re always on hand. With this approach you’ll make sure that you’re not wasting time sorting through ten different Cannibal Corpse t-shirts before you get to that faded, vintage Coca Cola shirt that your father-in-law always compliments you on.

Color

This one should be a no-brainer. Organizing shirts by color is great whether you’re using the ‘situation’ method we discussed above, the alphabetization method we’re going to talk about below or simply using color by itself. This method is ideal for people that don’t have a huge amount of t-shirts. If you have a pretty good mental picture of just about everything you own (IE: you’re not a t-shirt hoarder like some of us are) then you can use color by itself. Black goes with black, red goes with red and etcetera. If you only have three red t-shirts, you’re looking for that aforementioned Coca Cola shirt and they’re all in a little subsection then it’s going to take less than ten seconds to find it.

Alphabetical

This method is for t-shirt collectors and obsessive compulsive people. I have a buddy that separates his closet by situation, separates by color and then alphabetizes within all of those subsections. He owns mostly band t-shirts (and he has over 200), so it makes finding the right shirt much less of a nightmare for him. Even if you don’t own that many band t-shirts, alphabetical sorting can be pretty helpful. If you have a big section of black shirts in your ‘boys’ night out’ category for instance, then using all three methods will yield great results when it comes to finding the shirt you want. You might not want to wear your Joe’s Pub n’ Grill shirt if you’re drinking at Joe’s, so avoiding that shirt should be pretty easy.

You might still be sighing, grumbling and rolling your eyes at this point. For some men, organizing clothes just isn’t in our nature. If you look at it purely from the standpoint of practicality, however, you’ll see the benefit in organizing your t-shirts. Once you organize your closet or dresser and stick to your system, it should be smooth sailing-- you’re going to spend a lot less time trying to find the right shirt and a lot more time wearing it. 

This post was written by Adam Farwell. Adam is a writer, blogger and designer. He generally blogs about design, fashion, marketing, small business branding and the various creative projects he’s involved in. He currently writes for funnyshirts.org, where you can customize and design your own funny shirts.