Organizing for Your Brain Type - Inside my head

I love this kind of stuff. I'm not so interested in how the brain works, but I'm interested in how understanding brain functions can help me live better and more comfortably. I'm also interested in how all of this inevitably fits in to my personality and style. After taking the 50 question test I scored most in "Innovating Style". The styles are explained like this:

Prioritizing Style (frontal left section of your brain): Adept at analyzing data, you prefer to delegate organizing.

Maintaining Style (posterior left section of your brain): You develop and follow routines well and adhere to traditional organizing methods.

Innovating Style (frontal right section of your brain): Artistic and creative, you have a unique stacking system that no one else understands.

Harmonizing Style (posterior right section of your brain): Valuing interconnectedness with your family or coworkers, you need your environment to be peaceful.

Now had I not taken this test or even understood a little more about myself and my habits I would've guessed my style all wrong. Only considering my MBTI score (ISTJ) I would have guessed Maintaining Style for myself. ISTJs like to follow rules and adhere to tradition, however, when it comes to organizing I've failed at every single "traditional method" seemingly possible. I've known this but I'm still obsessed with organization. As a matter of fact the one area I scored lowest on was Maintaining Style with a final score of 3.

The second interesting tidbit I already know about myself is that I am not right brained, I am indeed left brained. Looking at the other left brained option (Prioritizing Style), though, it's only half true. I am adept at analyzing data, however I certainly do not prefer to delegate these task to other people. I scored at 13 in Prioritizing Style, which isn't bad, but the book suggests that you should score 20 or more in a certain area to claim it as your own. I think I can explain why I scored higher in right brained functions when I am left brained, but I'll do that in a little bit since I have to draw on another source for that.

My next highest scoring area was Harmonizing Style, getting now into the right brained functions, I am pretty much shattering the whole notion of me being left brained, but I'm really not discouraged by that. I do like interconnectedness, as a matter of fact I live for interconnectedness, but I don't require peacefulness in my environment. I like it, but I don't require it. I scored a 14 in this category, which is also not bad, but still not the required 20.

Finally, Innovating Style, I scored exactly 20 in this category. The author made a point of stating that we can overlap in styles, and I know this is certainly true for me, but if we "increase our awareness" we can conform to the style that is most comfortable for us, which will seem more natural and easy to us.

So why Innovating Style? I think because when it comes to physically organizing, this is where I potentially live, even if I don't live in this world all the time. My beliefs and values may be more maintaining, and the way I organize data in my head is a combination of Prioritizing and Innovating, while I expect my relationships and knowledge to be more Harmonizing. My physical world is most definitely Innovating. Having this kind of understanding is actually adding another layer of clarity to a part of my life that has been otherwise overlooked.

I also live in two different worlds when it comes to home and work organization. I expect my work world to be more organized than my home world, I obviously feel the most amount of stress at home though, because it is "disorganized". I think I'm like most people where I often come home and don't want to think about appearances anymore. I spent 8 hours trying to keep up appearances at work by keeping the circulation desk neat and tidy for my co-workers and patrons, when I come home I just want to relax. For whatever reason it is not hard for me to stay organized at work but it is extremely difficult to stay organized at home. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I have to share my work space with others, while at home my husband and I are the only ones who see our mess. I also think that it is more strenuous to stay organized at work than I think it is. I'm constantly trying to keep my organizational standards in par with traditional methods at work that I may be straining my brain more than I want to.

So once I started reading the chapter on my type I was a little more encouraged, however there are still some discrepancies with my style. The description of me sounds nothing like me:

• adventurous
• artistic
• non-conformist (ok sometimes I can be this)
• spontaneous
• passionate (and sometimes I'm this, but it depends on the topic)
• creative

These are not words I would pick to describe myself. The author also goes on to explain I have an "aerial view of reality, using your creativity to introduce new and exciting ways of doing this, and are easily bored by repetitious tasks. Your thinking is complex, so you may find it challenging to articulate many of your deeper thoughts and ideas." This is more like me, except for the whole "aerial view" thing. I am not a big picture thinker, I am a step by step thinker, I just have the ability to make connections and figure out problems in my head very quickly (this is how I am able to design entire databases in my head before I even crack open a program).

When I step back to the description of this type and look at how I usually try to organize and how I usually fail, that's where I start to see the similarities show. The "stacking method" the author attributes to the Innovating Style is exactly what I do, only I started calling it "piling" after reading this Lifehacker article. I have piles of crap everywhere. I do this because I need to see things in order to get them done (a quality of Innovating Styles). If they're filed away I forget about them because I have so much going on at once. Alex and I joke about my piles, but it's really something I tend to always do so I know it's more than just a habit. Even my computer desktop is another version of "piling". I fashioned my start page using Netvibes so I have everything I need in front of my face when I open my browser. Last night when I was trying to figure out what I was doing wrong with my MT Plugins I had 20 tabs open, everything where I could see it. This also explains why my most favorite storage feature we added to our new apartment were these two, big, open shelves in our office. The shelves house our blank CDs, papers, binders, just about everything office related. Normally I hate being able to see that stuff, but it felt almost liberating to have a nice place to keep these things that was essentially in view but off the ground and desks. I've always said that we need to use more vertical space in our apartment anyway. I still have piles on the floor, but if I ignore those, this is my favorite room because it feels functional and right.

Now the whole right brain vs. left brain dilemma. Lucky for me I've already come to terms with this whole mess. I do feel that the brain is too complicated to categorize well but on the other hand I love to categorize so I'm not going to shy away from that. Taking all sorts of personality tests is really telling, and sometimes they can be contradictory. A couple of years ago I went test crazy, but I was also interested in knowing what made me tick. I took all sorts of tests over at Tickle and I even bought a couple full reports to see exactly what they said. The one that most got to me though was The Brain Test. I'm not sure why but for the longest time I really did think I was right brained. I think like most people we tend to group right brained with creative and left brained with analytical and that's that. We almost draw a line between the two and say, "you can't be creative, you're left brained!" That is so very wrong, but admittedly I fell into this trap at first. I was also in an environment that leaned more toward the "right brainers" and disregarded the "left brainers" altogether. Needless to say I'm happy to be gone from there.

I also just assumed that I was right brained because I spent most of my life as a musician and even went to school to be a musician. Well, once I woke up I realized that what I loved about music wasn't the creative stuff anyway. I love music theory, I even enjoy music history, and once I got to college I found that I enjoyed performing much less than when I was in high school. I know I'm going against what I've been taught in private lessons when I say this, but I enjoy practicing more than I enjoy performing. My organ teacher said something along the lines that there's no reason to put so much time into practicing if you never perform, but this may be one time I disagree. I enjoy playing for me more than other people. If that makes me messed up then so be it. I know my teacher was basically trying to push me to perform on an instrument I wasn't yet comfortable performing on but I could sit up at the organ bench and "perform" all day for myself and never once perform in front of an audience, but still be happy.

I love music and I still do, but the passion I have for music as a creative art actually masked the true nature of my personality, and that is my analytic side. I've always been good at math but I told myself early on that music was the only thing I wanted to do. I do enjoy programming once in awhile and I love just sitting down and tinkering with computer programs and figuring out problems, puzzles, and games. What music did that I would've never expected it to do though was exercise the right side of my brain. If I had gone into math or computer programming instead I actually think I would be a completely different person today. My humanities background has actually forced myself to use a side of my brain that might have gone under utilized had I chosen another career. When the period of discovery happened a couple of years ago I did realize that I'm glad it happened this way. The other thing I discovered is that I have the ability to use both sides of my brain effectively and even uniquely. I think it what sets me apart from other people, but it is also what sets up the contradictions in my life and personality. I'm ok with that :)

Anyway, I'm not even done with this book yet! I have yet to discover what kind of system works the best for me. I can't wait to find out if it will indeed work.

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