5 Easy Steps to Simplify Your Work Wardrobe

Hello everyone, this week we’re covering a simple tip to save time and mental energy at the beginning of your day. I started doing this years ago and it definitely saves me at least 10 minutes and a heap of decision-making every morning. 

Getting dressed before work used to look like me getting up, wandering to the closet, looking around and realizing I have nothing to wear, walking to the dryer to see what was clean but not put away, finding a shirt—okay, that’s a start, rifling through the dryer to look for pants to go with the shirt, realizing the pants hadn’t made it through the laundry yet, so then rifling through the dirty laundry… you get the picture. So much time wasted. So much unnecessary decision-making and frustration. 

Now, when I get up for work, I walk to the closet, pull down a hanger, and find everything I need to wear, clean and ready to go. Zero rifling through loads of laundry. Zero decisions. Zero frustration. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but simplifying this little part of my day has made the morning so much more pleasant and helped set the tone for a less stressful day all around.

Here’s how you can simplify your work wardrobe if you’d like to give it a try:

Step 1: Think about how many days you work every week, and pull that many empty hangers out of your closet. I’m going to use 5 days a week as an example because that’s my current schedule. Some of you work less and I know some of you work more. 

Step 2: Go through your closet and find the pants and tops you regularly wear to work and pull those out. Put them on your bed where you can see them and arrange them into outfits, one for each day of the week that you work. In this case, 5 outfits.

Step 3: Put each outfit on its own hanger, add a mask (safety first during this pandemic) and hang it up in your closet. I actually add underwear to the hangers too—I don’t want to have to make ANY decisions about clothes in the morning before work. I don’t go so far as to label my hangers with the days of the week, but if labels are your thing, by all means, get out the Dymo.

Step 4: Find one more back-up outfit (mine is scrubs) and keep it at work for the days when one of your patients gifts you with some bodily fluid that you just can’t finish out the day wearing. 

Step 5: Enjoy those extra 10 minutes in the morning, sleeping, calmly drinking your coffee, patiently walking your dog instead of trying to force a fast pee so you can get the heck out the door to work (can you tell I speak from experience here?) And, enjoy the fact that you only have to do laundry once a week and you’ll always have clean clothes to wear to work. 

So, what will people think when they notice you wear the same thing to work every Monday? They won’t notice. I have been doing this for years, through many different clinics and in all that time, only one tech every noticed my clothing rotation. And you know what, when I showed up on a Monday in not-my-Monday-pants because I’d been at a conference that week-end, she was so disappointed. In an unpredictable profession such as ours, maybe a little predictability is comforting. 

Now, if putting together outfits in the morning lights you up and energizes you, by all means, keep doing it. But if you’re like me, and you just need to pick out work clothes because it’s unprofessional to go to work in pyjamas, then I’m certain this will help you get out the door in a better mood every day. 

As I write this blog post, I’m just about to head back to work full time after a maternity leave, and I actually can’t wait to go through my closet and figure out my clothing rotation to simplify my mornings. I’m sure my extra 10 minutes will easily be spent getting my kids dressed and organized, but maybe I’ll do clothing rotations for them too…

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The Two Paths to Finding Joy in Your Work Again

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Your Best is Enough