Lately I’ve been all about restructuring my closet so I am actually wearing the pieces that I own. The other week I shared an exercise you can do that will help you find your personal style, and today I wanted to share an exercise that will help you know what clothes to buy that you’ll end up actually wearing.

I shared a glimpse into how to do this exercise in this reel, but I’m going to give you a quick breakdown here as well! All you need for this is 1-2 sheets of paper and a pen, and you’re going to end up making 3 columns followed by a pie chart.

Step 1: Label your first column “weekly activities”. Here, write down each kind of activity you do during the week. This might be anything from work, date night, GNO, workouts, errands, etc. Then under each activity, write down the number of times you do it per week. So work would likely be 5, working out may be 4, etc.

Step 2: Your second column is going to be labeled “clothes”. In this column, right down what kind of clothes/pieces you wear for each activity. So for example, next to my “work” activity I wrote: jeans & a tee, and athleisure. Since I WFH, these are the type of clothes I wear for work. Do this for each remaining weekly activity.

Step 3: Make a third column for “shoes”. Then write down what kind of shoes you wear for each activity (heels, sandals, slides, sneakers, etc).

Step 4: Lastly, tally up the number of times per week you do each activity from column 1, and write that number at the bottom.

Once you’re done, you’re paper should look something like this:

Now it’s time to make your pie chart. Draw a pie chart with the same number of slices as the number you just tallied up from column one. You can see above that my number is 12.

Once you have your pie chart drawn, assign each weekly activity with a color or design and then fill in a slice for each time during the week you do said activity. You can see mine below:

Once you do this, you’ll be able to see what activities take up most of your time and then you can compare it to your clothes (and shoes) column to see what pieces you’re actually wearing most often. For me, work takes up the most time so jeans and a tee, plus athleisure. Everything else is pretty even, but for errands and workouts, I’m pretty much wearing either jeans and a tee, or workout clothes/athleisure as well. The only time I really deviate from those two categories is a couple times a week when I go out but I’m still wearing jeans and then just a nicer top.

This activity made me realize that 90% of the time I am dressing very casually so those are the types of clothes I need to shop for. Occasionally, I may buy a nicer or dressier top for the couple nights a week I go out but I don’t need to make those items a big priority for my closet. And I don’t need to ever really buy heels (or keep all 15+ pairs that I own) because I maybe wear those a few times a year if I’m going to a wedding or something.

Hopefully this helps you get a more realistic perspective on what you’re actually wearing and what you therefore should be buying more/most of! Let me know if you try this!!