I have a
caveat to the method with which one should sort laundry.
Not only do I sort laundry into light and dark but, I find it helpful for folding if I also sort the laundry by type and user of clothing.
For instance, my family and I generate about a load a day of laundry. I wait until I have about three loads ready in the laundry basket before I wash anything. I then sort it by color and type, then by family member depending on how much of an item I have.
I reach into the basket and grab pants first and toss them into light and dark piles. If I've generated a full load of either dark pants or light pants, off they go to the washing machine. If not (and, when I come back from putting that load into the machine), I continue sorting into darks and lights by type. If I have dark pants, they go into the dark pants pile. If I have dark shirts, they go just to one side of the dark pants pile. If I have additional darks, they go to the other side.
I'm fairly sloppy about whether the clothing actually goes to the side or not and, I figure that it doesn't matter a whole lot in the long-run, anyway. The only reason that they're separated at all is in case I find myself with a full load of dark shirts, I can easily separate them from the pants and whatever because all of the shirts are on the same side of the pile. If not, I can just grab the whole batch and do a load of dark shirts and pants.
At any rate, what this gets me is a presorted batch of dry laundry at the end. I can now become totally braindead when I fold laundry because I'm just folding pants and chucking them onto a stack by family member. Putting them away is trivial as well at this point because if I'm putting away nothing but pants already sorted by family member, I can remain braindead and still come out successful.
Of course, the only benefit to this is that I don't have to make 400000 small stacks of clothes when I fold or make 500 trips back to my kids' rooms to add one more piece of clothing to their closets at a time.
It works for me, anyway.