There are many mundane tasks we must do every day in our lives merely to maintain some sense of order and cleanliness. You know the tasks I'm talking about--not the ones like eating which we must do to stay alive, but the ones like sweeping the floor or cleaning the bathroom, which aren't actually necessary to stay alive, but alas must* be done. One such task is folding laundry. In principle, you could just have a clean clothes pile and a dirty clothes pile in your room, and it would work fine. However, a much nicer living space can be obtained simply by folding clean laundry and putting it away.

Believe it or not, I know someone who at the age of 28 had never really folded laundry. Now, he didn't actually just have a clean pile of clothes on the floor, but he had always just hung up all the clothes he owned on hangers (excluding boxers, he can fold those). The place where he is staying right now there is no closet space however, and he is forced to fold his shirts, pants, etc. Since he's never really done it before though, it could take him almost an hour to fold a single large load of laundry. Luckily (or unluckily, depending on your point of view), I've been folding laundry since I was a kid and am very efficient at this process. I decided that clearly the humanitarian** thing to do would be to teach him to fold laundry more efficiently.

Here is the original smallish pile of clean laundry.


To start out, I had him fold a pair of pants, a shirt, and a pair of boxers using his old folding techniques. The times were: pants: 17s, shirt: 12s, boxers: 6s. Below is the result of this test:


I then proceeded to show him a more efficient laundry folding method. For example for a shirt, you pick it up by the two shoulders, snap it once to smooth the wrinkles, fold it in half lengthwise, fold the sleeves in against the main body of the shirt using your top hand, place your lower hand at the middle of the shirt, and then drop the shirt over your lower hand. This leaves the shirt folded nicely. You can apply a similar principle to pants and boxers. It took a few tries until he perfected the technique, but soon he was folding much faster. Below is a sample set of clothes I had him fold after practicing for awhile. The times were: pants: 4s, shirt: 5s, boxers: 5s.


This is a comparison of the two sets of clothes. They fold quality is similar in the two sets.


Below is the completely folded load of laundry, which was finished in under 10 minutes. Great gains in efficiency were made, and now he can spend less time doing this mundane task.***



*Some might argue that "must" is a strong word to describe these tasks. I know groups of guys who lived together for years and never once cleaned the bathroom.
**Full disclosure: it's not completely humanitarian, as I made him practice on a load of laundry that contained mostly my clothes.
***I realize that some people like folding laundry and don't find it mundane. Those people are weird.