How Long Does It Take to Decide What to Wear, and How Much Time Could You Save?

In a 2020 poll of 2,000 people in the UK for Barclays, women said choosing what to wear took them 18 minutes on average, and men said 20. The release gives the minutes but not how often, since it doesn't say "a day" or "each morning". So read them as a rough guide rather than a daily total. How much time you could save depends on your own mornings. Deciding ahead only pays off when it saves more minutes than the planning takes. In the two worked examples below, it saves 5 minutes a week in one case and 99 in the other.

What the Barclays poll measured

The poll was commissioned by Barclays Plan & Invest and carried out by a company called Mortar, using a representative sample of 2,000 people in the UK in September 2020. That makes it British data, so if you're in the US, your mornings may look different.

The release doesn't publish the questions people were asked. "Choosing what to wear" may have meant slightly different things to different people, and the averages are people's own estimates.

Special occasions were a different story. Choosing an outfit for one took women 6 hours on average and men 29 minutes. Without the questions, it's hard to tell exactly what that time includes. An average can also be pulled up a lot by a few very long answers, so treat it as rough.

In this poll, the gap between men and women ran one way for everyday choosing and the other way for special occasions. It's one poll, in one country, in one year. It can't tell you whether men or women generally take longer.

What 18 or 20 minutes a day would add up to

This part is example math, not something the poll reported. Take its two averages, 18 and 20 minutes. Then assume something the release doesn't say, that the time is spent every single day.

At 18 minutes a day, that's 126 minutes a week (2.1 hours) and 6,570 minutes a year, about 110 hours. At 20 minutes, it's 140 minutes a week (about 2.3 hours) and 7,300 minutes a year, about 122 hours.

Counted as full 24-hour days, that's roughly four and a half to five days a year. You couldn't get all of it back, though. Even an outfit you picked the night before will probably still take a minute or two to check, and the math further down allows for that.

What US government data shows, and what it doesn't

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics runs the American Time Use Survey, which has official US figures for men and women. It has no separate entry for choosing clothes, though, so it can't measure that on its own.

What it does measure is "grooming," meaning washing, dressing and grooming yourself. That covers getting dressed, changing clothes and laying clothes out, but also showering, putting on makeup, doing your hair and shaving.

Here's how long people 15 and older spent on grooming as their main activity in 2025, converted from hours to minutes and rounded.

Average minutes a day, 2025	Everyone	Men	Women
All days	40	35	46
Weekdays	42	36	47
Weekends and holidays	37	31	43

The lower weekend average comes from fewer people doing any grooming on those days, 73.0% compared with 82.7% on weekdays. People who did get ready spent about the same time either way, around 50 minutes.

Keep the two sources apart. This is US data about all of getting ready, and the poll is British data about choosing, so they can't be added together or compared minute for minute.

How much time could deciding ahead save?

None of the sources here measured how much time deciding ahead saves, so the honest answer is a formula.

Time saved each week = (minutes choosing now − minutes choosing after deciding ahead) × days a week − minutes spent planning

Planning time is easy to forget, and it decides whether you come out ahead. A 15-minute weekly session spread over five workdays has to save you 3 minutes each morning just to break even.

Here are two cases. Every input is an assumption, not a survey result, picked to show how much the answer can swing.

Example math	Low case	High case
Minutes choosing now, per day	8	20
Minutes choosing after deciding ahead	4	3
Days a week	5 (workdays)	7
Minutes spent planning each week	15	20
Saved each week	(8 − 4) × 5 − 15 = 5 minutes	(20 − 3) × 7 − 20 = 99 minutes
Saved over 52 weeks	about 4 hours	about 86 hours

The low case is someone who already picks fairly quickly and only plans workdays. Planning eats most of what they gain. The high case starts from 20 minutes, the higher of the poll's two averages, and assumes it happens every day, which the poll doesn't say. There, deciding ahead frees up 99 minutes a week, or a little over three and a half 24-hour days in a year.

If you already choose in a few minutes, planning can cost more time than it saves, and that's a perfectly good reason to skip it.

Is there a cost beyond the minutes?

You'll often read that choosing clothes also uses up willpower you need later in the day, an idea usually called decision fatigue. It's a popular idea, but popular isn't the same as proven.

Psychologists have put a similar-sounding idea to a big test. Ego depletion is the theory that self-control works like a limited resource. In 2021, a preregistered study across 36 labs with 3,531 participants found no evidence for it in its main analyses, and only a small effect in an exploratory analysis. That study tested self-control tasks in a lab, not choosing clothes. So it can't tell you whether picking an outfit wears down your willpower. For now, the minutes on the clock are the cost you can actually check.

Find your own number

Timing yourself for two weeks will tell you more than any average.

1. For one ordinary week, start a timer when you begin choosing and stop it once you've settled on everything you'll wear, changes of mind included. Jot down anything that slowed you down, like a rainy forecast, a favorite top in the wash or not knowing what the day called for.
2. The next week, decide ahead in whatever way suits you, a few days at a time or just the night before. If you want a routine to follow, the step-by-step guide to planning a week of outfits around the weather and your laundry walks through one. Time your mornings again, and time the planning too.
3. Put both weeks into the formula above. Leave special days, like a wedding or a job interview, out of the weekly numbers, since one long search can swamp a week of quick mornings.

If you'd rather start the morning from a suggestion than a full closet, that's the idea behind Ezfit, a smart digital wardrobe coming soon to iPhone and Android.

Each morning it will suggest a single outfit, chosen from your clean pieces to suit your city's forecast and your style. It leans toward things you haven't worn in a while, and if the suggestion doesn't feel right, you can shuffle it or hold on to a piece you like. For days you want settled in advance, you'll be able to line up outfits for the coming days on its calendar, which also keeps a record of what you've worn.

It isn't out yet, so there's no data on whether it changes how long anyone takes to choose. If you try it after launch, the same two-week test will show you.