What can Fluther say and show me to make me love folding and hanging and putting away my clean laundry?

You’ll make love more often if you have super neat, clean clothes.

I do something* which, if it hasn’t made me exactly love folding laundry, it certainly makes the task go faster. I divide all the dry stuff into like piles on my bed—socks with socks, T’s with T’s, washcloths with wash clothes, etc. Maybe everybody does this, but I figured it out on my own.

Stop your grinnin & drop your linen…that’s all I got

There is nothing we can say. Laundry folding is thankless work and boring as hell. No platitudes about altruistic satisfaction can change that.

About all I can suggest is to put your mind on something else. Put a DVD on and watch it as you fold. If you like porn, watch a porn movie as you fold. If you are into politics, tune in to C-SPAN.

In other words, let your mind be distracted even as you do the awful work.

Play some music.
The pile of clothes I have amounts to just over one mega wash total, so it’s very routine for me. I fold everything as I see them, putting shirts, shorts, etc. in groups. Then, I put them in their respective drawers/hangers.

Try to find satisfaction in Finishing the Cycle (a tip of the hat to Peter Walsh). Clean, fresh-smelling laundry is its own reward, and it takes only a few mintues to fold (or hang) it and put it away. Avoid thinking about how much you hate the final step of doing laundry, just do it, and let some muscle memory set in and take over.

I love this question!

I’m someone who absolutely loathed folding laundry. Now, if I see a laundry basket full of household laundry (we have tons of it), I love it. It’s the same with doing dishes or mowing the lawn.

I have integrated this into my mindfulness practice. In fact, as my actual meditation has decreased, mindful tasks such as folding laundry is the perfect opportunity for my practice.

If I can make any suggestion at all, it would be to do the following…

Pick up a piece of laundry. Feel it as though it’s the first time you’ve picked it up. Take care to focus on that single piece of laundry. There is no other. It’s not something to be done to get to the next piece, etc. Be completely present to fold that towel. Do a great job.

Bonus: If you’re the least bit interested in turning this into a concentration/contemplative/mindfulness practice, you can notice when your mind starts to do what minds do. Your mind will start looking past this experience to all the things you can do after. It will drift into thoughts about the past. Emotions and thoughts will appear as either a trickle or a torrent. Trying being aware of them, while not jumping on board. Step back slightly and watch the mind do its thing. Then watch the mind react to having been pulled away from the pure concentration of the laundry. Watch the emotions come flooding in and fill you with more thoughts of regret and frustration.

You can learn a ton about your mind while folding a basket of towels. And if you find moments of concentration and your mind can become relatively still, you might experience something entirely pleasurable.

Damn, just send me the laundry. I’ll fold it!

Do play music, but choose one group or artist you like very much, and make that your laundry musc.
Make it an event. Make a cool routine, like twenty minutes of video game first,or equivalent. Treat yourself after. Again, something kept for laundry only.
Make it artful. I have too many things now to bother, but I use those colorful plastic hangars. I used to color coordinate the hangers with the clothes.
It does take a while to adapt, but if you work with the suggestions we have all provided, you will soon find yourself zipping right through the task. (yes, I went with the zipper pun)

Also, a stopwatch. Time yourself, and set new records. Make goal times, and celebrate when you meet or exceed those goals.

Nothing you can do will ever make me love putting away laundry. It’s a pain in the ass.

I used to fold clothes for a living, but lost my appreciation for it at home.

My best suggestion is do a fabulous fold, make everything beautiful, and hopefully the satisfaction of the pretty and doing a good job might help. Stacks that folded the same size. Like colors together and left to right light to dark in your closet. If you fold in an uncomfortable position get a folding table that is at a good height for your back.

Taking proper care of your clothes will make you enjoy and appreciate them more. (It helps to put extra care into shopping for things that really work for you.)

Before it was just like, eh, clothes, whatever. I just threw them around or dumped them in a drawer. Now I have a bunch of cute dresses and tops in bright colors. I hang them up nicely in my closet, almost as if it’s a store display for me to shop later. It’s really fun to put together an outfit now. I’m excited to find something in my closet, thinking, “wow, look at all these nice things!” It makes my room neater and makes me feel better about my outfits when I go out.

It’s kinda like eating vegetables or working out. Once you get used to stuff like that, the wholesome feeling of taking care of yourself is its own reward.

I don’t like it at all but listening to good music definitely helps.

Lots of good advice. I will have to attempt this next time and report back.

Thanks

Well, wow. I had laundry to hang up to dry yesterday, and did what @hominid suggested. Reluctantly and unhappily – at first. After fully concentrating, however, my mind slowed down and the experience was suddenly simply okay. Not something to get done quickly, but just what I happened to be doing at that second. Like the moment you spend sinking into a bubble bath.

Now, I have some training to do, of course – but I did manage, for a couple of times, to just be in the moment. At some point, I found myself smelling a towel and thinking about just that towel, nothing else. At another point, I was trying to organize how I would write this post, and, in particular, how I’d explain that I had been thinking about thinking about the post…but at least I was/am aware of the irony there.

Most surprising, to me, was how the calmness carried over to other activities after that. I brushed my teeth, mindfully. Re-filled the dog’s water bowl – mindfully. Normally, I spend the twenty seconds this task takes anxiously tapping my foot. This time, I watched the water swirl. Thanks, @hominid!