You already have enough to worry about when you travel for work, why make dressing well one of them?

Table of Contents

• Step One: Gather a week’s worth of clothing options
• Step Two: Remove Redundancy
• Step Three: Add Accessories
• Step Four: Remove Redundancy, Redundantly
• Step Five: Revise Regularly
• In practice: my exact capsule wardrobe

Packing is terrible. Well, it’s terrible if you do it the way I used to do it.

I would wait until the last possible moment to pack, and then hurriedly shove whatever I could find into a carry-on. I would somehow end up with six shirts and only two pairs of underwear for a week’s trip.

Nothing matched, and even though I thought of myself as a well-dressed guy, I always ended up looking like a schlub in front of important clients.

After the third late-night trip to a Target to buy underwear, I decided I needed a better strategy. I started where I always start with an intractable problem: Google.

One late-night google session and some critical thinking later, and this simple outline for repeatedly, consistently packing was born. I’ve since refined and perfected it so that it takes minimal time and provides maximum style points.

The basic strategy is simple enough: instead of packing from your closet every week, pack from a short list of things that can stand up to the rigors of travel, be chucked into a carry-on in a couple of minutes, and provides enough versatility that you can re-use it for weeks on end without repeating an outfit.

In return for the one-time effort of going through this editing process, packing light becomes automatic, you get 30+ minutes of your life back every trip you take — even more if it helps you to stop checking bags — and you always look good on the road.

There are some additional benefits to this sort of strategy once you get to your destination, too.