A conversation I had with my son this week struck me as something that might benefit more than him.

My son frequently takes off his clothes and then leaves them in a pile on his room’s floor. Then, he feels irritated when I walk past his room and remind him to pick up his clothes and put them in the hamper. He also gets frustrated when he can’t seem to find something in his room, and he invariably finds it when he picks up his dirty laundry.

We had a sit-down discussion about this, during which I reminded him that if he simply put his clothes into the laundry hamper as soon as he took them off, they would neither clutter up his floor nor bury his tiny building set pieces (which is inevitably what goes missing under the clothes pile).

I also pointed out to him that it would take lot less time and effort to simply drop them into the basket while they were already in his hands as he’s taking them off. If he does this, he doesn’t need to put them down and then pick them all up again later when they turn out to be in the way.

By avoiding putting clothes in a pile in the floor (or piling them on a chair, or wherever they happen to accumulate) we save ourselves the task of picking them up and dealing with them at another time.

Of course, if you’re not a child (or a mother of a young child), your clothes may not need to be washed every time you wear them. If that’s the case, substitute hanging your clothes back up for putting your clothes into the hamper. In either case, the principle is the same: put the clothes where they need to go straightaway.

Just like my Touch-it-Once paper system (see HERE), putting whatever is in your hand in the place it needs to go immediately saves you the trouble of straightening up later. It’s one of the small ways efficiency can simplify your life.