Comments on: How To Never Lose a Sock Again

By: Rico

Rico — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 16:45:51 +0000

When taking your socks off, try to remember to put one inside the other. That way they’ll always be together (hopefully). :)

By: Lea

Lea — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 07:25:46 +0000

Well, it works and it doesn’t – myself, I never lose socks.
But my kids? I’ve taken the quarantine method to extremes – whenever i get an odd sock it goes in The Single Sock Drawer.
I go through it regularly finding pairs, and some of them turn up.
But I swear, the washing machine really does eat socks, with a penchant for children’s socks (are they smaller and sweeter?)
Every year or two I just throw away a drawer full of socks, because their mates will never be seen again.
I have had really nice pairs that they have worn once and I know they came home in, because, well, they came home wearing socks, and by the time they come out of the basket to go in the drawers – the fights are over, a separation is underway and the pair will never be seen out together again.

The sock monster lives at my house.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 12:09:04 +0000

Humm, been doing the quarantine thingy for years, but I think I have more single socks there then the paired ones :D Will dig trough your method I think ;) Maybe trowing away a bunch of them won’t harm.

By: Shirley Kaiser

Shirley Kaiser — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 04:06:26 +0000

Well, another way to manage socks is to keep a pair together by using a sock holder or even a safety pin. A sock holder is a plastic gizmo that you stick your socks through to hold them together, such as those sold at http://www.sockpro.com/ — there are lots of them all over the Internet and they’re quite inexpensive. Safety pins can work just fine, too.

Sock holders are made specifically for keeping a pair of socks together through the washer and dryer. So if you keep a bunch of sock holders with or next to your laundry basket, you can get in the habit of removing your dirty socks, sticking them through a sock holder, and then throwing them in the laundry basket. I’m assuming here that when you change your clothes that you put dirty clothing right in the laundry basket and not wherever they land on the floor. ;-)

Regarding sorting, I have 5 or 6 stackable baskets in my closet (takes very little space since they stack), so when I change my clothes, dirty clothes get tossed into the appropriate basket — a very quick and easy way to sort laundry! That eliminates the need to sort a bunch of laundry, and it’s proven to be quite time-efficient. Prior to tossing into the washer, though, I do make sure nothing got tossed into the wrong basket by accident, of course.

At any rate, if you always keep your pair of socks together, you won’t have a bunch of single socks. I started doing this years ago with my 2 kids. I swore there had to be a sock monster gobbling up socks. Sock holders really helped!

By: Michael Moncur

Michael Moncur — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 02:14:40 +0000

Joseph: the more I learn about productivity*, the more the whole idea of “wasting time” becomes meaningless. I find that the more time I spend writing (even if it’s something silly like Keith’s post or this comment) the more I get used to writing regularly, which helps me write more useful things.

And when I’m not in a hard-working mood, having fun for a while helps me get back to working hard far more than trying to work without being focused.

* I almost said “the more productive I become.” That would have been a stretch.

By: marisa

marisa — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 22:18:11 +0000

Well, I’m not all that concerned about socks, per se, but thought I’d share a laundry-related system my husband and I use. We set this up after we realized that the reason we were always behind with the laundry was that we hated sorting stuff (now you see the relevance to this post…).

We have six laundry baskets, two each for ‘normal’ care, darks; ‘normal’ care, lights; and ‘wash-in-cold-water-only’ items. When the system is ‘empty,’ there are three stacks of laundry baskets, so that there’s a single place to put every item of dirty laundry (if you wanted to adapt this to your ‘sock-preserving’ system, you’d just change the ‘in-boxes’ to match your desired sorting parameters).

When one of the baskets is full (we actually do this on Fridays, normally, but whatever), it gets washed, with its ‘twin’ basket left in place so that we still have somewhere to put dirty laundry of that type while the other laundry is in-process.

Because it’s gotten rid of our most-loathed step, we now keep pretty much on top of the laundry.

I’m still waiting for someone to invent a system for automatically folding the laundry, however.

By: Lawgirl

Lawgirl — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 21:34:09 +0000

Somewhere I read two tips on dealing with the problem of lost socks:

1. Have a limited variety of socks. For example, make sure most of your socks are the same color, brand and size, rather than having many different varieties. That way, you don’t have to worry about pairing them up at all.

2. Buy a bunch of small, elastic hair bands. Keep your socks banded together in pairs in your sock drawer. After you wear a pair of socks, band them back together and throw them in the laundry. When you wash and dry them, they will come out of the laundry in pairs and you can put them back in your drawer and start over.

By: Joseph Nader

Joseph Nader — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 15:28:37 +0000

Keith, sorry if I rained on your parade, I didn’t intend to upset you or be overly personal. But I do think comments should reflect what a person truthfully feels, or what’s the point?

My more constructive criticism is that this cult of “getting things done” is in danger of becoming a distraction. Perhaps you are getting ad-revenue from sock sales from posts like these, I don’t know, but my point was to suggest that sometimes it’s better not to waste other people’s time with trivial posting. It seems to me you have run out of things to say on the subject.

While I concede it may be fun for you to write about your socks, the whole spiral of addictive blog-reading when the writer has nothing of interest to say any more or feels they have to post every day to keep up momentum is in fact one of the prime causes of time-wasting for that blog’s “hooked” readers, so is it not doubly ironic then that you indulge in on a blog dedicated supposedly to hacking ways through the time-wasting and distraction jungle? Is this not a real point? Why encourage what you hope to get the better of?

By: Bruno Figueiredo

Bruno Figueiredo — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 13:58:07 +0000

Well, I use a slightly different approach for not losing socks. I live in Portugal, so we have a California-like weather and we sun dry our clothes here. We almost don’t use drying machines.

So, I bought a nylon net bag with a ziper and I wash it with all my socks inside. That way it’s easier to separate them. Then I take out the bag and I put every stock on a small fold-out set of wires that is set indoors (my clothes are almost dry as my machine has 1200RPM).

Then the socks are placed on a bin and I stretch and fold them in pairs for neat storage.

If I find a stray I put it on the set of wires and next week it will sure find it’s match there.

By: Jesse

Jesse — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 12:40:08 +0000

Hey, I enjoy a bit of whimsy; I think this was a cute post.

I once saw a friend’s mother hook each family member’s socks on their own large safety pin. They all went through the wash-and-dry process and came out sorted.

In spite of the fact that I’m probably the most disorganized person I know, I did it myself for awhile: simply because I thought it was so clever…