Pack clothes

About this visual support

Packing clothes is a counting problem disguised as a household chore. Two unknowns have to be held at once: how many days the trip lasts and how cold or wet it will be. Without answers, every item becomes a guess, and the result is often six jumpers and no socks.

Pictures turn the number into something you can see. Four pictures of underwear means four pairs, one picture of a raincoat means the raincoat travels, and the pile on the bed can be checked against the row of pictures before anything goes into the case. The counting moves out of the head and onto the floor.

One tip that usually unties the knot: build the pile by day rather than by category. One stack per day with everything that belongs together makes a missing day obvious straight away, and mornings on the trip get easier because the whole outfit sits in one place. If you would rather keep the list on a phone, the packing can be built as a picture routine in Routined, which can be tried for fourteen days at no cost.