I Tried the “Inconvenient Rule,” and Now I Can Finally Keep Up with My Laundry

I’m always looking for ways to get myself to stay on top of laundry. I have found strategies like the “while it’s warm” method that do keep me on track for a while, but I inevitably fall right back into my old ways.

My instinct is to do everything possible to make laundry easier, such as having separate hampers so laundry is pre-sorted by color or person. These shortcuts definitely help — but as I found out from Shauna Dean (@homebyshauna)’s perspective-shifting hack she shared on Instagram, making laundry less convenient might be the key to actually keeping it bite-sized and therefore manageable. 

The inconvenient rule involves purposely making the laundry inconvenient so that you don’t put it off and let the piles grow. As Dean explains in the video shared on Instagram, since she started doing this she has “felt more on top of washing, folding, and putting away clothes.”

Conventional laundry methods revolve around steps like washing, drying, folding, and putting away, which allow for bottlenecks and accumulation to occur at each step. Think back to how many times you couldn’t add a dirty load to the washer because the dryer was full, or you couldn’t bear to start putting the folded clothes away because there were so many baskets full of them. 

This rule, on the other hand, leaves no room for laundry to pile up (at least if you manage to move clothes from the washer to the dryer). The method calls for folding the laundry right in the laundry room and then taking the folded piles by hand to where they need to be put away. Each step is inconvenient, forcing you to deal with small amounts of laundry right away. 

Dealing with laundry in the moment is key to not letting it pile up, so I decided to give this a try. My laundry room is tiny, and I don’t have much room to leave clean folded laundry there. I also don’t have a counter to work with and currently have a top-loading washer. So I only have a small space on top of the dryer to stack folded clothes.

If I don’t put these clothes away before the dryer starts running, the clothes will topple over and all my folding will be undone. By not allowing myself the convenience of stashing clothes in laundry baskets, I’m forcing myself to put them away immediately unless I want to waste all my hard work. Do I have to make more trips up the stairs? Sure. But I don’t mind because I’m listening to my audiobook anyway. And best of all, when I’m done making a few trips the laundry in that load is done — not being added to a big job I’ll have to tackle later. The inconvenient rule lightens the load of laundry. By breaking this never-ending, never-done chore into tiny pieces that can’t be put off, this unexpected strategy might just be the secret to keeping the laundry mountain monster away.