Having a family of eight means that one of my primary hobbies is doing laundry. Lots and lots of laundry. We find that if we commit to doing a simple dozen or two loads a day, we can pretty much stay on top of it. We’ve had a lot of systems through the years, but we have finally gotten to a perfectly honed process that guarantees if you ever need a very specific shirt for a school dance competition or family photos, it will be exactly where it’s supposed to be for the two weeks before and after, but completely and irretrievably lost in the exact moment you need it. Today, I am offering to you, for a limited time only and at our lowest prices ever, a detailed step by step outline of our world famous method. If you, too, want to be efficient and carefree in supplying your family with clean clothes, follow these steps precisely. Your life may change.

1. Wait until your daughter complains she has no pants without holes. Or your husband gently asks if you have seen any of his work pants. Or your five year old starts wearing his swimsuit and puffy vests with no shirts in December. You may be tempted to act earlier, but that takes all the fun out of it, so resist that temptation.

2. Put a load in the washer. Attempt to make sure the thing they wanted is in the load. It will mysteriously disappear somewhere between the washer and dryer and end up at the bottom of a random dirty bin, but you can say you tried.

3. Go back the next morning and restart the washer.

4. Repeat step 3.

5. Repeat step 4.

6. Repeat step 3.

7. Pay your kid a dollar to sit by the washer until it finishes and put the clothes in the dryer for you.

8. Do as many loads as you can in a 24 hour period after you realize no one has any underwear. Let the rest of your house sink into slow entropy while you devote all your mental energy to this one task so you don’t get distracted. Remind yourself that today, clean clothes are more important than making sure your five year old isn’t drawing on your car with chalk naked in the driveway. (Turns out chalk comes off with the hose, which can also be used to hose down your naked five year old.)

9.  Relax and tell yourself you have been very productive. And make frozen pizza for dinner. Laundry day is frozen pizza day, always.

10. Realize you have been relaxing for three days and the pile of clean laundry in the laundry room is spilling into the hallway and swallowing small children. Move it all onto your bed to force yourself to fold it.

11. Throw it on the floor when you walk in at midnight and realize you never folded it all. Move it back and forth from your bed to the floor for three days.

12. When you get embarrassed at how many times you have moved around the mound of clean clothes, take an afternoon to binge watch M*A*S*H and fold it all. Put in in nice neat baskets to be taken to rooms.

13. Watch more M*A*S*H and refold all the clothes your kids have scattered on the floor looking for pants for three days, because you have a baby and who can carry a baby and a laundry basket at the same time? Only people who wear baby wraps, and you are definitely not that person because you never learned how to fold a baby wrap because it seemed too much like origami and you are really, really terrible at origami.

14. Wait until your husband gets sick of living in the laundry room and refold all the clothes again together. It’s very romantic. Put the clothes away because your husband is doing it and you like peer pressure. Feel very proud of yourself and ignore the fact that it took you two weeks to wash and put away a load of laundry.

15. Wait one day, go into the kid’s rooms for something else, and find the entire pile of clothes you just put away on the floor mixed in with all the kid’s dirty clothes because they couldn’t decide what to wear that morning. Take all the clothes that are both clean and dirty and put them in the hamper because you can’t tell which is which.

16. Repeat steps 1-15 and enjoy.

17. Enter a M*A*S*H trivia contest. Win a lot of money. With your winnings, hire a maid to do the laundry.

As you can see, this system is flawless. It will absolutely make laundry your favorite part of the day and you’ll never have to worry about it ever again. (Except for socks. There is no system for containing socks. I recommend that after you wash the socks, you put them all in a great big bin, and then put that bin on the curb and let the sanitation engineers haul that sucker to the landfill. Then just buy new socks. It’s worth it, I promise.)