How to Organize Your Closet the Tetris Way
Use your Tetris skills to neatly arrange clothes, shoes and other things in the closet.
Moving to a new place presents a variety of different challenges. Among them, unpacking what seems like an endless supply of boxes. This can take days and even weeks to accomplish, but neatly putting away your favorite things is extremely satisfying, especially when it comes to organizing the closet.
Unfortunately, that closet will eventually become a mess. This is where your Tetris skills prove invaluable. Similar to fixing wrong moves in Tetris, you first need to look at your closet and assess the damage.
When I open my closet, for example, I see jumbled clothes on each shelf, a few jackets dangling limply off their hangers, and a pile of miscellaneous nonsense. What would you do?
Most importantly, don’t panic! Instead, dive right in! When playing Tetris, Tetriminos will continue to fall after you make a mistake. With this in mind, think of each item in your closet as a Tetris shape. They all have their designated places, and can coexist comfortably when put together the correct way.
Your method of organizing a closet, much like your Tetris play style, will undoubtedly differ from mine. However, the outcome remains the same for us both… a clean closet, and a huge confidence boost after putting your problem-solving skills to work.
When I clean my closet the Tetris way, I grab a spare bin, remove every article of clothing from its respective shelf or hangers, and then dump these things straight into the bin. In doing so, I now have a clean, empty closet to work with rather than a disaster.
I start by reaching in, grabbing a pair of pants or a shirt, fold the clothing neatly and then put it on one of my shelves. This shape-by-shape approach repeats until the bin is empty.
Socks and intimates are like the “S” and “Z” Tetriminos, at times tricky to deal with, but each with their own respective place in relation to the other items in my closet. For example, when I put pants on a shelf, I typically have extra room on the sides.
When it comes to my awkward sock balls (yes, I still fold my socks into balls), I bookend my pants on either side of the shelf so that when I grab my clothes for the day, I go in order: shirts, intimates, pants, socks, and shoes. This gives my morning routine a bit of predictability.
Keeping things clean and maintained is easy once I know where everything goes. After doing a few loads of laundry, I can repeat the same bin-to-closet process. This Tetris-style method frees my mind to think of other things, and eases the stress of not being able to find that one black t-shirt because it was thrown in with all of my other black articles of clothing.
Now that I cleaned up my closet the Tetris way, I have time to do other things, like playing a few rounds of Tetris on the computer. I hope this advice will help you organize your closet, and I’ll return soon with more examples of how you can use Tetris in the real world.
