Become a nudist.

No clothes = no laundry.

I used to dislike laundry in the past, until I figured out that the part that I disliked was the monotony and lack of mental stimulation. This could be solved by listening to podcasts or audiobooks while doing the laundry. Now I no longer dislike it, because it's really only an opportunity to listen to podcasts for 30-40 minutes (hang-drying/folding time)

Find a partner who doesn't mind doing laundry.

Live out of a laundry basket. If anyone questions it just curl yourself around the laundry basic and scream like a possum protecting its nest of young. Maintain solid eye contact throughout. Defecate if necessary.

They’ll never mention it again and probably warn others. you can then live out of that laundry basket free of judgement.

Follow me for more info about living life with the freedom of a possum .

I often put on a podcast while folding laundry to entertain myself...

Lower your standards. Half-ass fold things. Don't use hangers. I drape over the drying rack and have gotten pretty adept at a quick lift and couple of shitty folds into a stack. Another tip is to have clothing that don't care about wrinkles (synthetics, sports clothing). Then you can just throw them into a drawer. I have pretty homogeneous clothing (all the same featureless t-shirt in black, white, grey, same underwear, etc). This helps with the organizing on to the drying rack. I know exactly how many of each goes where and it is trivial to color coordinate so the half ass folding naturally collates the stacks.

I wait to do laundry every couple of weeks. It all fits in one load most of the time (bought largest high efficiency machine, 12kg capacity). Some clothing gets more than one use before washing, and it entirely depends on how active I am in that clothing.

All of this helps me personally mitigate my extreme disdain at the task. Oh, and getting absolutely stoned out of my mind. Put on some tunes, it ain't so bad either the draping (largest things first), or the shitty folding.

Idk i just do it to make my girlfriend happy and that's plenty of motivation lol. You just have to budget the time in, i just budget 1.5 hours and i do it all slow and chill and it works out.

As an adult with a family, this won't be accepted anymore.

This right here is the real problem. Can you explain what''s unacceptable about it and why you're not asking, "How do I convince my spouse to accept this?"

Nakedness. Ideally find a work from home situation. Careful answering the door.

OK, so I have ADHD and absolutely hate tasks like laundry. I have found a few different solutions which have worked at various points in time depending on my available means.

When I was drying clothing by hanging I started hanging my t-shirts on hangers to dry. This meant I could get them out to dry in one handful and that once dry they could all just be put into the wardrobe with no extra fuss. Underwear and socks were handled by hanging on a little clothes horse and then just thrown in together into a drawer. I make sure to only have one type of identical sock so I can not pair them.

Now that was all good and fine but my means have increased and life has gotten better, so my methods have changed. I can now afford a heat pump dryer. This is an absolute game changer. I put washing on, when it is done I move it from the washing machine to the dryer, then when it is done I put it away.

The dryer is super efficient, using way less power than a traditional dryer and hurting the clothing way less. It uses the same system as an air conditioner to pull moisture out of the air while it throws the clothes through the warm dry air.

Because I have enough clothes now I can also do a smalls load and a separate load for just t-shirts and then all the other clothes like pants and jumpers. Because of that I can sort the smalls much faster and then put them in my new storage.

I have an 8 cube shelf. In each cube I have a fabric box which has one type of item. I have two for t-shirts, two for pants, one for underwear, one for socks, and two for anything else. I just dump items in with no folding or sorting. If I want a shirt I can pick the colour but because all the shirts are the same brand and model that is the only difference I have to deal with. My pants are basically all of a type and are really only summer or winter gear, so I just have long pants on one box and shorts in the other.

The great thing is the simplicity. Shirts are never folded, rolled, or in any other way managed. They are just thrown in. I try to empty one first and then fill that one first from the dryer so they all get rotated through, otherwise they would go musty after a time, but apart from that it is super low effort.

I also have the same for towels and bedsheets, but for bedsheets I put the full set inside one pillow case with the fitted sheet as the last item in so when I use them I pull out and apply the fitted sheet, then the flat sheet, then the second pillowcase to cover the pillows. My kitchen stuff is also similar with a single basket on top of the fridge with tea towels and microfibre cloths so I can just replace them daily or more as needed. I really should put a mini basket in the kitchen for the dirty ones but for now I just throw them into the laundry.

Overall I spend less electricity washing clothes and drying them in the dryer than I did rewashing clothes I had put off hanging. I think it is a worthy trade and saves me from avoiding the washing too much.

As an adult with a family, this won’t be accepted anymore.

Says who? Like if it's your clothes your room your life, do it your way.

Signed. A couple who hasn't folded clothes in months

This is called a Haberdasher Stand. When you undress you hang you clothes on it. Wear the same clothes as many days in a row as you can. Much less laundry per week.

honestly I find hangers the best option. shoe caddies are nice for things that just can't go on hangers like socks.

i have a touch of the autism and i can tell you what has made a huge difference for me. especially with socks and underwear but also shirts and shorts and sweatpants, always buy the same exact brand and style. find the best option for each member of your family and stick to it across the years. laundry day will become MUCH less of a task. 👍

I wear the same clothes two days in a row, sometimes three. This alone cuts laundry in half, or by a third.

When I take off my clothes I don't bunch them up or turn them inside-out, so they come out of the dryer ready to hang with minimal fuss.

All of my socks are the same, black Dickies, so I don't need to match them.

I hang everything, because I hate folding. Also, when it's folded, it's stacked somewhere, and you need to dig through the stack to find anything. Socks and underwear go in a bin.

Dresser. Little boxes called drawers that hide your lack of folding. They’re great for things like underwear items.

Of course, you’ll look like like child or homeless person walking around in crap that’s wrinkled to that degree. Depending on your job, you may get pulled aside for a talk regarding your appearance.

The dresser will remove roughly half this onerous task for you, reducing clothes on hangers in a closet, but you’ll likely still need clothing that doesn’t look like it came from the dirty floor pile.

The definition of adulting is accepting a list of tasks you never really want to do. Until you’ve done that, you haven’t really grown up all the way yet.

Produce less dirty laundry. Depending on what you do for a living, and the climate, some clothes can be worn more than once. The main ones that come to mind are pants, but your discretion on other items. Just don't be gross and stinky

Invest in merinos and wool / hemp / tencel-lyocell clothing . They retain less odor, evacuate sweat better, plus, more adapted to heat/cold regulations. Even wool can be cool in summer. Avoid cotton first layer like t-shirts, you almost need to wash them after one use. They tend to smell quickly. A merinos shirt can be used Monday, be hanged Tuesday, used Wednesday and so on. Invest in a good pair on denim jeans if wear this kind of pants and remember that it doesn't need to be washed unless it's stained or smell bad. Denim should just be hanged on reverse side outside from time to time to take fresh air. Use merinos socks too. Work the same as tshirt. You will still need to wash, but less often.

The cons are merinos and other wool need to be hand washed at best (there wool program on machine, but I don't risk it). And merinos is more fragile than cotton or synthetic fabric.

And if you don't like folding, use hangers. That how I do.

I think there’s unavoidable costs to doing laundry.

But I try to minimize them by doing stuff like rolling my t-shirts instead of folding them.

Also, you mentioned UX design. Well, I do a bit of Lean, if you want to call it that. In particular, I minimize switching costs by focusing on one type of item at a time. For example, first I get all the boxers out of the pile of washed clothes. Then I check they’re not inside out. Then I roll them. And then I place them where they have to go.

I adopt a production line mindset. And it can become a game. How fast can I do it this time?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_SNExtznd4

You can probably get away with socks and underwear just being tossed in a drawer. I actually find button-up shirts easier to deal with than t-shirts because hanging is easier than folding.

Try getting a little bit victorian with it.

Back in the day, washing machines didn't exist. Mass manufacturing didn't exist. Clothes were very expensive so people couldn't just wear a thing once, then put it in a machine to wash it. So they had other solutions that worked.

They would protect their clothes from getting dirty by wearing full coverage undergarments. Linen was quite common. This layer protects your actual clothes from the gross oils and stuff from your body. You have to wash the undergarment but your main clothing is kept clean and only rarely needs washing. Reduces the laundry to the minimal level that could be done by hand.

Mine get folded as I take them off the line and then mostly sit on the dresser or in a basket until the next week. Yes, we could put them away but also we have other crazy messes we need to work on too and it's the least of the problems (2 kids, 2 pets, both work, no family help etc.)

As an adult who has just sacrificed a box room for a Boaxel system with a bunch of open boxes to toss my clothes into (similar to your shelf system but visually less messy), I don’t understand why you can’t go back to a system that worked for you before.

Laundry is also my mortal enemy. The folding mostly, so now I’ve done away with that. Little basket things on each shelf for various clothing items, it’s much more aligned to my natural style. Use it, don’t fight it.

I use a drying rack, too. I hang clothes neatly because I’ve been too lazy to iron anything ever since I started doing my own laundry. (I don’t usually wear fancy button shirts though)

I don’t use clips for most things, just hang t-shirts and boxer briefs neatly folded in half over the line. So on lazy days, I just pick them up folded like this. This uses much more 2D shelf space in the closet than when folding properly, but it’s faster.

Another option would be using hangers only. Put wet clothes directly onto hangers to dry them. When dry, grab the hangers and put them in the closet. Requires a closet with more hanging bar space and hangers than shelves.

For socks, having the same pair (maybe 2-3 different heights/thicknesses for different seasons) helps so you can just throw them in the same 2-3 boxes all together and usually you just have 1 type of sock per season anyway.

Trousers are less of a problem for me. Not sure how common it is, but where I live it’s common to wear the same pair for a week or so. Well, 1 pair of work trousers and 1 pair of normal trousers/shorts per week. Depending on how much you go outside in your free time, even less washing for the normal pairs…

As another user also noted, reducing the amount of laundry also helps. Maybe look into different fabrics. For example, (merino) wool t-shirts can be worn multiple times before they start to stink. Bamboo viscose or wood fibres like Modal or Tencel (e.g. 70%/30% mixed with cotton) also stinks less. Doesn’t dry as fast as wool, but not relevant to you. Maybe look into hiking/trekking or onebag forums.

Wear a bikini

Could your spouse take over the laundry? Could you pay to have someone else do the laundry?

I had a lot of issues with cooking and I solved it exactly how you described it. It took many many many months, but it did get resolved. The learning curve was awful because I had issues on every single step.

If you have the money, use a wash and fold laundry service