Using GTD to do laundry

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sdann

Registered
The time involved in searching for clean clothes in the many baskets or on the floor of your laundry room and then not even knowing if the items are clean, must seem eternal. Alternately, the costs associated in getting new clothes that you can wear must be rather high. I can see your frustration.

The steps I would take are this:
1. buy 2 hampers - one for your and only your dirty clothes; one for your and only your clean clothes. Get hampers that you can put locks on if necessary. Each hamper gets a large sticker with your name on them, so they can't be mixed up with his.
2. separate all of your clothes from the piles and from the floor in the laundry room. Don't do anything with his clothes, since he doesn't like what you do with them anyhow.
3. put your clothes into a) the dirty hamper or b) the clean hamper
4. set a time frame where you can be there to monitor the washing and drying cycles of your clothes.
5. wash and dry your clothes and only your clothes. As you finish your loads, put them into your clean clothes hamper.
6. fold the clean clothes and put them away. fold them in any way you want: criss-cross, roll them up, be creative.

Unfortunately you will need to do this in one big timeframe, lest your clean clothes land on the floor again. Include any non-clothes items you use, such as sheets and towels. You can also wash anything of his if you like (it's your choice). Then just throw his cleanly washed clothes into one of his many hampers for him to fold using his method and his schedule. Meanwhile you are no longer affected by this.

Voila clean clothes for work or even for everyday living!

If he does anything more to hinder you... well, I can't help you there.

PS some of the steps come from the other posts. one can only be so innovative with laundry.
 
C

cojo

Registered
Thank you very much for the suggestions, I am definitely implementing some of these. It may sound silly but I did a mind map and took some suggestions people had.

I did do a post a month or two ago about frustrations with being too tired when I got home to do housework and people started replying about how my husband should help more. I've got that under control after trying a number of things including the helpful suggestions. The most successful strategy was waking up 15 minutes earlier in the morning to process things from the night before, saving heavy cleaning for Saturdays, taking 30-60 mins for recharging activities (walking, etc) after work, and using a tickler file at home (I had one at work but not at home). Hubby loved the idea of a tickler file when I told him about it and he uses it too. Dinner after work got under control by making a firm commitment to shop every Saturday morning and having lots of easy-to-prepare foods in the house that he can make too.

Here are my next actions and obstacle removals...

1. Schedule about 2 hours to put away my 6 baskets of unfolded laundry. Clean out dresser drawers and purchase additional clothing hangers so I actually have space to put items away.

2. Hampers - will create 2 PERMANENT hampers in the bedroom with dividers for color-coded cloth bag liners (pillowcases). One for him and one for me. Bag gets washed with the rest of the load and therefore goes back upstairs (and put away) when laundry is done. Will keep additional bags on hand.

3. Laundry will happen once every week on Saturdays. The confusion of having two people do it during workweek is not working and if one day is extremely busy, the process freezes.

4. Put a timer on the 1st floor set for cycling out the laundry. When the timer goes off, it's ready for processing.

5. I will not fold his laundry (this is why the hampers are separate) but it will go on his side of the bed when it is done with a "clean" post-it. Can't really do anything about his putting it away but at least it will not be out of sight or on the basement floor.

Thank you to all, hopefully this will get under control and humming along within a week or two.
 
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