99% of my clothing are pants, shorts, underwear, t-shirts and socks, and I've never felt the need to sort them - everything goes into a washer, then a dryer, then gets sorted into dresser/closet. Are your clothes significantly different from mine, or is there an actual benefit to washing your socks separately from your pants?

(Or are you talking about separating things like sheets, towels, etc?)

I sort mine too - depends on the color. Darks go in cold and whites generally on hot.

I wear a lot of white sports socks. All of them are pure white after years of having them.

I've been doing the same thing for years. I have two bins each for socks, underwear, and t-shirts. when the dirty one fills, I wash it then dump into the respective clean one. The trick is to buy a full loads worth of socks, and a full loads worth of underwear which is probably an unusually large amount for most people. Throw hardware at the problem!

I do this with the small things that I need to buy, keep one roll of toothpaste (or whatever) that is being used, another in a cupboard. As soon as you take one out of the cupboard, buy new one to put in the cupboard.

Funny how a bit of sorting makes a difference. Sames goes for trash, I plan to have few bags so you can them dump each blindly.