If you’re like me then you likely haven’t give much thought to organizing your sock drawer. You know the drawer that I mean. It’s the one that contains your sports socks, dress socks, casual socks, and other assorted patterns, all jumbled together in one big mess. Sometimes it can take a few minutes to find a matching pair of socks in that jumbled mess when you’re in a rush to get to an interview. Often the solution means dumping the entire contents of the drawer onto the floor and then sifting through the rubble to find what you need.

Maybe it’s time to organize these socks so that you can get at them in a fast efficient manner. Organizing a sock drawer need not be a major chore, but doing it can give you a huge leverage of time in the future. So, five minutes of thought now in exchange for never having to do an exhaustive search for a complementary pair again.

What would be the best way to organize the socks? Start by dumping the sock drawer onto your bed to see what you have. If it’s been awhile, chances are there are socks in the pile you didn’t know you even had. Those can then be promptly thrown out. Now find pairs for everything. Any stray sock that doesn’t have a partner can also be thrown out. Be brutal. There’s no room for sentimentality when it comes to organizing socks.

So now you should have a collection of pairs of socks all over your bed. Should you roll the pairs together? Rolling means stretching one of the socks of a pair over another so that you’re left with a small ball that represents one pair. It’s personal preference what you’d like to do. Rolling pairs together will make for better organization, but the process of combining 2 socks together can cause them to stretch and might lessen their life. Most people find it best just to place the socks in drawers the way they are.

Now the fun begins. It’s probably best to put your newly sorted pairs into small piles based on function. At minimum you’ll have a sports pile, a dress socks pile, and a casual socks pile. Try to condense all of your socks into about four or five functions. Having five small piles seems much more manageable than one large pile. This way, when it comes time to find a pair in the future you’ll have to sift through a much smaller pile and that task won’t seem as daunting.

Once you have your four or five small piles it’s time to actually prepare the drawer. Find some unused shoe boxes or small cardboard boxes and fit them snugly inside the drawer. Then place each different pair set into one of the boxes. Your most-used socks can go on the left and those you use the least all the way on the right.

Now if your friend gives you that last-minute call and asks you to play tennis you won’t have to spend a majority of time looking for the right pair of socks.