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What’s your Organizing Fingerprint?
I’m working on an idea, and I’d love your help with it. The concept is grounded in my own personal philosophy, a bit of personality theory, and my experience working with people. The core of this idea is that each individual organizes their stuff uniquely, with a logic reflecting how attention, memory, energy, and priorities interact.
When I started Messy Desk, the construct in my head was fairly binary. I thought there were Tidy people and Messy people. Tidy people put everything away at the end of the day, in labeled folders and tidy drawers. Tidy people would consistently use a planner, and it would be beautiful and color-coded. The rest of us kept buying new planners and using them for a couple of months, at most. That’s why I wrote The Messy Planner, to give the Messies in the world a planning system that works for them.
But the more I watch people, the more I notice that we each seem to create order in different ways. Some people need everything put away. Others need everything visible. Some have an immaculate kitchen but a mountain of clothing in their bedroom. Some build elaborate systems and happily maintain them. Others love a new system but get bored with maintaining it. Still others work in bursts of inspiration only to look up hours later to discover they have created piles of stuff all around them.
