As the busy person you no doubt find yourself, it can become overwhelming to see the dirty clothes stacking up day after day (or perhaps week after week or month after month or decade after decade). To ensure that you and your household always have something that doesn't smell like a boy's locker room, it is critical to keep on top of the laundry.
If you live alone, I'm afraid you'll have to take responsibility for this job on your own. You may be lucky enough to have parents or relatives that will do the laundry for you if you bring it over and leave it in a noticeable location every time you visit, or you might be rich enough to be able to hire someone to pick it up and clean it for you, however, you still must be the one to take initiative and ensure that the laundry is in the correct location for the obliging laundry doer to do it. Being responsible for laundry may seem like a simple thing, but only to those who have exactly the right amount of time and motivation to do it. For the rest of us, it becomes a matter of simple tricks to get it to work correctly.
1. To increase motivation, place the laundry in a prominent location so it's impossible to ignore. Suggested locations include on top of your phone or computer, suspended from a closed door so it falls onto you when you open the door, and in front of the refrigerator.
2. Ensure you have sufficient amount of laundry soap at all times. If you do not, you may find it difficult to motivate yourself to run the cycle. However, it can be helpful to realize that most of your clothes probably aren't dirty enough to require soap anyway, so running the cycle without it will work in a pinch.
3. Set reminders for yourself. If you forget to set the reminders, you may have a problem that goes beyond forgetting to do the laundry. Putting post-it notes or digital reminders in likely places or maybe everywhere if you're not sure which would be the best place may make you too tired to actually accomplish anything that day, but might help you remember for tomorrow.
If you live with other people with whom you'd like to share the duties of laundry-doing (read: make them do it), your job may be easier. However, housemates have a tendency to be less motivated and less bothered by having dirty laundry dropped on their heads than you, so you may have to up your laundry-motivation if you need to convince others to do it for you.
1. Hide all your housemate's essential clothing so they have to run the washing machine.
2. Strategically "lose" the remote in a heap of laundry.
3. Set up the laundry yourself to encourage your housemate to simply push a button to get the system going.
4. Whine about how the house smells like dirty laundry every time your housemate is in earshot.
5. Wear your housemate's clothing and explain that you, "had nothing else to wear"
Whatever you try, remember that no matter how frazzled your relationship with your housemate becomes, it's most important that you don't have to do all of the work. Even if you end up hating each other, as long as you don't have to take responsibility for your own chores, you've won, and that's all that matters.
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