Capsule wardrobe challenge: lifestyle analysis
Capsule wardrobe – how to spend less time and energy on buliding it?
According to the rules described here, you can create capsule wardrobe by selecting items matching the activities that take up the most time of the week / month. For this reason, it’s a great step to analyze your own lifestyle before deciding what to choose for your compact closet.
It’s best to start by thinking about how you spend your time most often, what activities you take during the month or season. Then draw the percentage of time on a circle describing 100% of your time to figure out how big that part of your life is. Then those proportions can be easily converted into amount of corresponding type of clothing in the capsule.
Why is it worthwhile?
You build a compact wardrobe from a relatively small amount of clothes that you really like and you feel great wearing. Let’s assume that casual style is your favourite one. Completing your 40 pieces of clothes, you could choose most of them in casual style. Suppose, however, that at the same time you work full-time in a place where the so-called smart office look is required and you need to wear elegant clothes to work. When you stand in front of your capsule every day, you will still complain that you have nothing to wear, because there will be not too many things that suit your work.
Meanwhile, if you take a moment (okay, 5 to 20 minutes) to analyze your lifestyle, you will see that work probably consumes at least 60% of your time. This will make you pay more attention what you choose to your capsule as you need more smart clothes in it. Also look at the calendar – do you have any important meetings, events, celebrations in the next 3 months? If they are very rare, you can create a separate mini capsule for them (e.g. if you wear very elegant clothes most of your time and you plan a two-week holiday, you will prefer the mini refill capsule only for these two weeks of wearing casual clothes). I know, this is a compromise, but if you are at the beginning of the capsule challenge it is better to move towards minimalism in small steps than to quickly find out that it does not work in practice.
Capsule wardrobe – my analysis
I spent 5 minutes on this analysis. In my case, the activities are:
work at home (including walking the dog) 50% – (casual clothes + homewear)
work outside home 15% (business style)
spending time outside (informal meetings, going out for lunch, etc.) 25%
business meetings 2% (I arrange most of them by phone or e-mail, but for personal meetings I choose the business style)
more formal social meetings 5% („slightly elegant” evening style)
sport 3% (running, cycling and yoga)
Since the homewear outfits are not included in the capsule wardrobe, my task is a bit easier, because most of what I spend my time is not included. The exceptions are when I work via Skype. The sports outfit is also not in the capsule. My analysis shows that I must pay the greatest attention to the selection of informal clothes for spending time and work outside the home, as well as for meetings that require more formal attire.
And how about you? The Lifestyle Analysis file is here [download id=”5905″].
Chcesz wiedzieć, jak stworzyć garderobę kapsułową?
