A Master Planner's Laundry Schedule

A blog-post on laundry and laundry tags

If you are like me, this is your laundry routine :

You segregate your clothes into two categories before wash— colors and whites.

Thereafter, you collect all of it in bulk, add a lump-sum amount of detergent (and bleach), and put them in the washing machine.

Then, you do your important work, without caring about your clothes.

After wash, you bulk dry clothes at a reasonable temperature in the dryer.

Finally, you iron the thicker clothes, look for creases in the thin ones and iron them in haste.

Dry-cleaning is not in your dictionary.

For a scenario like this, our clothes need to be of the best quality, physical endurance and chemical tolerance, which is a lot to expect.

However, there is a category of master planners or the so-called 'Sheldon Cooper Club' who plan out doing their laundry and have long-lasting clothing.

Here, I will try to mimic them by using my own clothes and plan my laundry to maintain the cloth quality and longevity. Table 1 provides brief laundry instructions for seven of my clothes, ranging from wearable like denim and t-shirts to non-wearable like carry-on and napkin.

Table 1. Laundry instructions for chosen clothing.

Usually these instructions are embedded on our clothes.

Figure 1 below provides the universal laundry symbols used in cloth tags. It is important to consider additional instructions for each cloth before planning to do laundry. As Sheldon Cooper would do his best to bring order to this world, let's try to help him this one time.

Figure 1. Universal laundry symbols.

Based on categories provided in Figure 1, all clothes can be divided into

• 10 (Machine Wash + Special Care)

• 3 (Bleaching Instructions)

• 12 (Dryer Instructions)

• 5 (Iron Instructions)

• 5 (Dry Cleaning)

The numerical product of these permutations is a massive 9000 categories.

Thankfully, most of these categories do not relate to our clothes all at once.

Considering my seven clothes, I can categorize them:

• 2 (Machine Wash + Special Care)

• 2 (Bleaching Instructions)

• 5 (Dryer Instructions)

• 2 (Iron Instructions)

• 2 (Dry Cleaning)

The numerical product of these permutations is a more manageable 80 categories. It is still a huge number, so I can simplify it by following a step-by-step approach.

I can choose to categorize my clothes based on the phase of laundry.

1. Wash — at either 30°C and 40°C, including like-colored and those requiring bleaching.

2. Dry — tumble dry at varied heat, or normal dry flat in shade .

3. Iron — at either 110°C or 150°C.

4. Dry-cleaning — only denim can be dry-cleaned if required.

I can identify outliers beforehand to prevent spoiling the special clothes at each stage of laundry.

Remember Table 1 or like before creating a laundry plan :

• Wash cloth 5 using a non-chlorine bleach

• Wash dark-colored clothes together— clothes 1 and 7

• Wash light-colored clothes together— clothes 4 and 5

• Wash clothes at designated temperatures— 30°C and 40°C

• Dry clothes based on the mode of drying— tumble dry (1, 5 and 7) or non-tumble dry (2, 3, 4 and 6).

• Non-tumble dry based on place— on a flat surface or a rope; in shade or sun.

• Tumble dry at different heating temperatures— low heat (5 and 7) and medium heat (1)

Thus, my plan goes roughly like this:

1. Wash cloth 5 by adding detergent and bleach at 30°C.

2. Wash clothes 1, 3 and 7 by rinsing the bleach and adding new detergent at 30°C,

3. Remove these clothes, add clothes 4 and 5 and restart the laundry.

4. Then, add clothes 2 and 6, raise the temperature to 40°C and restart again.

5. Dry clothes 2, 3, 4 and 6 on a flat surface under shade.

6. Simultaneously, use low heat dryer to dry clothes 5 and 7.

7. Raise the heat level of dryer to medium and dry cloth 1.

8. Iron cloth 5 at 110°C and thereafter, clothes 1, 2, 3 and 4 at 150°C.

9. Finally, send the denim for dry-cleaning without tetrachloroethylene if required.

Seems like a lot of work, right?

The cost of quality cloth maintenance is doing an extra work for 9 steps instead of 3.

It appears to be a good bargain, given the simplicity of steps and the urge to keep our clothes fresh and healthy for a longer time. With planning and organization, you can wash your clothes in a way that makes them live long and beautiful.

Figure 2. A comparison of laundry schedules of a sloth and a master planner.

A few good blog posts on creating an efficient laundry schedule and routine - 1 2 3 4