Lisa WoodruffCEO and founder, Organize 365

How to Organize your Bedroom Closet

13 Jul 2018 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

2:11

In this instructional segment, Lisa Woodruff shares practical strategies for streamlining closet organization. She emphasizes that repeated reorganizations become faster and more effective over time. The first actionable step is to remove all empty hangers and place them in a laundry basket, aligning them in the same direction to prevent tangles and make retrieval easier—a task that takes about ten minutes but greatly simplifies later sorting. Woodruff then describes a rapid decision‑making method for children’s clothing: she holds each garment up, asks the child to say “keep” (yes) or “get rid of” (no), and repeats this process multiple times a year (2‑4 times) since the children were five, allowing the entire sorting session to be completed in roughly fifteen minutes. The overall message is that consistent, simple routines—like organized hangers and a quick keep/discard game—make closet maintenance efficient and less frustrating.

Chapters

One of the things you'll learn as you learn the skill of organization is that every time you go to reorganize a space that you have already organized before, it happens much quicker, the organization gets better, and you're able to get rid of more and more. The very first thing I did was I got all of the empty hangers out of the closet and I put them in a laundry basket. Hangers are complicated. When your hangers are on the rod or even if they're on the floor, like they tend to get tangled together. It's very frustrating. Hangers can be very frustrating. So I want you to do a couple of things when you go for your hangers and you're going to start to organize your closet. First of all, a laundry basket will help you a lot because you could put the hangers in the laundry basket and have all of the hangers facing the same direction. As if they were hanging up on a rod, but they're not. It will be easy to organize the hangers in this way and grab a hanger when you need one when you're putting things back into the closet and not tripping over them. This step can take up to 10 minutes, but it really is the step that will make going through your closet so much easier and nicer when you don't have those hangers in the way. So I've told you this before, how I go through my kids' clothes is I hold each item up high And the kids look at it and they say keep or get rid of, or they say yes or no. So yes means keep, no means I don't want it anymore. This is a pretty fast process for us because we have done it over and over and over again. I would say we do this at least 2 times, sometimes 4 times a year, and I've been doing this ever since my kids were 5 years old. So for Joey, that means we've probably done this Almost 100 times. So my kids are really good at this. And I will tell you, because I do this often, and they know that I go super fast, I go super fast for 2 reasons. One, I don't want this to take forever. And 2, I know kids get bored. So if I can get all of the decisions made in about 15 minutes, then we're good to go.