You may have noticed this blog have been very quiet for the last few years. This is because last in 2018 we had beatiful twin girls born in our family. And this made total count of kids 3. This leaves me with very little time for any hobbies, including blogging and open-source development. All that time is now replaced with time with kids or for kids (cleaning).

With this amount of little humans in the house, volume of laundry increased 5-fold. When it was only myself and my wife, we maybe had a laundry load washed every 4-5 days. These days I’m doing a load of washing every day, sometimes even two.

And being a developer I was looking for patterns and ways to optimise this work (this chore somehow landed mostly on my shoulders). One of the observations I’ve made:

Clothes items tend to be used more often then others if they got into a laundry basket.

I call this Laundry Basket Bias.

The mechanism is as following: a T-shirt gets into a laundry basket, gets washed, gets dried, ends up in the basket for sorting. When I’m getting dressed, usually this is a rush (because that’s the way with three kids), I tend to grab something from top of the basket with clean clothes while running downstairs to stop the 3-year-old from hitting his 1y.o. sister.

So that T-shirt I grabbed – I wear all day, kids wipe their dirty hands on it, etc., I wash it at the end of the day. Next morning it is usually back to the dry pile, usually it ends up on top of the pile, and usually I grab it while running downstairs to sort out another drama between little people.

Same happens to socks, jeans, underwear, etc. So some of the itmes get a lot more use than others because they ended up on top of the clean clothes pile. This is a Laundry Basket Bias.