I’m puzzled when I read articles about the importance of tidying… clutter and mess are supposedly distracting. They inhibit our ability to concentrate and cause us to be stressed. That’s no doubt true for some people, but not for everyone.
Einstein’s desk. Photo: Ralph Morse for LIFE
With some people the sentiment Creativity is seldom tidy comes to mind.
Psychologist Linda Silverman distinguishes between people who think with words and those who think with images. Thinking with words is sequential, step by step, and thinking visually is spatial, it links new concepts to ideas already learned.
This tends to affect how people store things in their environment. Silverman contrasts filers with pilers. I’m a visual thinker and have known a lot of pilers, so I think there may be some truth in that.
I had already been thinking of the different attitudes towards tidiness in terms of personality, like Myers-Briggs and Keirsey’s temperaments. So I tried an internet search on the relationship. 16personalities.com actually did a survey to see the connection between their personality types and attitudes towards tidiness. How cool is that?
I wasn’t familiar with their terminology, so I took their free test and learned about it. The test did a great job of describing me, and it has gotten a lot of good recommendations. If you like personality tests I would love it if you tried it and told me how accurate you think it is for you: 16personalities.com
I’m a Mediator…I’ll talk more about this tomorrow.
February 27, 2023
I took the test…got Logician. Now the logic in me says, of course!! If I answered truthfully…which I did, it’s logical.
🙂
I believe the one size doesn’t fit all on this and on every single thing there is. we are all so different and we all lean towards our way is the best way but that is not true. I did take the test and and it said I am Defender. about 90 percent of it was right on the money. Probably because I answered wrongly, My home is almost always neat, but not clean. when i was younger it was always everything it its place to the point of making my family and myself crazy, each thing had a place and must be there. I still feel that way but have changed enough to know life is not that way. now I leave things bob hangs on doorknobs and throws in chairs until I can’t stand it anymore, in the past i grabbed things as soon as they were misplaced. for some reason my desk is always chaos. i organize it and boom, it is crazy again. also the drawers I don’t care if they are chaos as long as I can’t see it.
Thank you for taking the test. 🙂
No, one size doesn’t fit all for this. I took the test and it said I was Logician but I don’t know if I totally agree with that
Thank you for taking it.
I love these sorts of tests! Mine came back Logician, but I suspect the results may have been very different if I took it 5 or ever 10 years ago.
Color me a neat-nik married to a chaotic. LOL!
Thank you for taking it.
weird – took the test – often on the fence in my answers – doesn’t matter which “size I am” but as I read the summary, I had to question the analysis
It’s fun to read some of the results and see which fits you the best.