The “While It’s Warm” Method Is My Shockingly Simple Secret to Conquering Laundry

Through the years, I’ve tried many ways to force myself to stay on top of the laundry. From combining everyone’s laundry into one load per day to changing my outlook on laundry as a whole, my relationship with laundry seems like it’s constantly evolving — and never quite settled. 

But I recently came up with a method that not only helps me actually keep up with laundry (which is no minor feat in a household of seven), but also makes me look forward to doing it. No joke. The strategy I’ve dubbed the “while it’s warm” method has me remembering the load that’s currently being done and getting it put away in drawers faster than any other system I’ve tried.

This method involves folding a load of laundry as soon as the laundry buzzer goes off. Obviously this means timing the completion of your load so that you are there to attend to it, but the payoff is worth it. Here’s why folding the laundry while it’s warm has become my absolute favorite way to get a historically tedious and often overwhelming chore checked off the list.

This method is easily adaptable to whatever amount of laundry you have to tackle. Promising yourself that you’ll fold each load while it’s warm prevents the task from taking longer than it should. Additionally, rather than having to deal with mountains of clean loads that take hours to sort, fold, and put away, folding each load while warm breaks up the folding and putting away parts of the job into doable chunks of time that take only a few minutes each. 

Folding the laundry while it’s warm helps prevent wrinkles. When clothes are left to cool in unkempt piles, wrinkles multiply. But clothes that are folded while warm are far less rumpled-looking. Not only does this keep your clothes (and you!) looking their best, but it also saves you the time you would have had to spend ironing, steaming, or using a wrinkle spray. 

The gentle time pressure inherent in having to finish folding a load while the clothes are still warm is just the push you need to get the job done. Much like setting a timer to clean the house ensures that the chore gets done efficiently, racing against time to finish folding before the clothes cool off prevents laundry procrastination. (It’s a thing.) 

Getting the laundry folded and put away quickly prevents laundry bottlenecks and the piles of clean and dirty clothes that inevitably get mixed up. There’s nothing worse than being halfway through folding when you realize that you’ve been folding dirty clothes for 15 minutes! It’s also pretty lame to have to dig through baskets of laundry to find clean underwear. Folding while warm is the key to saying goodbye to piles of laundry (at least clean laundry) for good. 

This point is less practical but just as impactful. Folding the laundry while it’s warm makes the job an enjoyable sensory experience. Becoming aware of the warm clothes and smelling the clean, lingering scent of the detergent as you’re folding has the potential to ground you in the moment through your senses, elevating a mundane chore into a calming exercise. This was the most surprising result of the “while it’s warm” method, but also the one I continue to look forward to the most — because this method is well on its way to becoming a habit.