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Powered by LifeTypeHere is a brief review of Organizing for your Brain Type by Lanna Nakone. This is a neat book that gives some explanation about why some people have trouble keeping things organized and why some have trouble understanding those others.
She puts people in four different groups, which are more intricate than my descriptions below, but they give a clue into them.
Maintainer: the naturally organized type.
Harmonizer: the people are more important than things, but I just can't part with the things people give me style.
Innovator: the artist, least traditionally organized type.
Prioritizer: the logical leader, spartan-desk-look type.
There is a quiz at the beginning to determine which brain type you are. When taking this quiz, I recommend giving the answer that is closest to what you would do or wish you could do if there was no external pressure on you to do it a certain way. I think because of our society's traditional organization, the answers can be skewed toward the Maintaining type.
Then make sure you read the detailed descriptions of all the brain types just in case your quiz put you in the wrong category.
I was convinced that I was an Innovator, despite some serious differences with some of the description. Then Jon read it and was sure I was not. Once we both read Harmonizer, we knew that is really what I am. Because of the complexity of the brain, some things overlap, and some of the overlap with Innovator really resonated with me. But it is the vast majority of Harmonizer that I identify with.
She gives organizing tips for the home and the office for each type. The idea of the whole book is that you need to organize in a way that resonates with how you think. You expend too much energy trying to use a system that doesn't align with your type of thinking, and so you end up not doing it.
There's also a chapter on how to get along with people of the other types. Some of this works best in office settings ("Never go into his office if you can help it.") A warning to Maintainers and Innovators: she admits these two are the most opposite from each other. However, my Maintainer husband did not like her solution for getting along. In his reading of it, the Maintainer needs to do all the compromise so that the Innovator can create in his mess.
There's also a section on sensory preference (auditory, visual, kinesthetic) with its own quiz. Any of the brain types can have any of the sensory preferences, and she says it's helpful to know this when you are organizing your home and office. It was exceedingly obvious from the quiz that I'm a kinesthetic, which I already knew.
I think this is a great book for non-Maintainers to understand themselves and get some practical ideas. I think it is an ok book for helping Maintainers understand the other types, but by definition they have a hard time understanding why their way isn't always the right way.
In other words, I want people here that I know to know who I am, just not google, for example.
Mike isn't the only one who uses Tor. But I don't use it consistently because it's too slow and I don't care enough to wait.
At least "me 3" was considerate enough to leave a url footprint behind. :) I was thinking I'm really tired of this game until I noticed that.
Ah, that makes more sense now. Well, I guess the anonymizing worked a little bit then.
>Well, I guess the anonymizing worked a little bit then.
The anonymizing only worked if one had a goal for it and it met that goal .....
In this case my goal was met. We all (or at least I) had a little entertainment (plus an interesting conversation about privacy).
The library finally came through with this book, and I've just started reading it. I'm interested to see where it will go, because I've already been surprised by the quiz. I was sure I'd be a cross between the Harmonizer and the Innovator, but my highest score was Maintainer! Actually, I didn't score high enough in any category to fit well: 15, 11, 14, 10 -- and you have to have at least 20 in one category to fit that label. Just like me to defy labels, I guess. Maybe I'll get more insight as I read further.
I just took the sensory preference quiz: Kinesthetic=11, Auditory=9, Visual=4. I'm not too surprised, but wish I could take the more official test you (Heather) took in school, because I know the situation is much more complex than the book's quiz can show. As low as Visual is in some areas -- powers of observation, for example -- I'd much, much rather get information from a book than a lecture, and in some ways (albeit weakly) my memory is photographic -- I'll remember the location on a page spread of a quotation I'm looking, for example. Yet if I've talked with someone for two hours and you later ask me what color dress she was wearing, I'll likely not have a clue....
That's why I gave the warning about taking the test. My score was similar to yours, with Maintainer getting the most points. I am definitely NOT a maintainer. But I have learned to use some Maintainer tools and that skews the results.
I'm going to try to make comments here while in the process of reading the book, rather than trying to remember them all at the end. :)
Although I know Dad isn't 100% Maintainer, here's evidence that that Force is strong in him:
With your linear, structured style, you focus on details and develop effective methods that allow you to manage tasks and complete assignments, checking them off one by one. Your work style isn't about speed, but reflects a methodical approach that usually requires uninterrupted time to get the job done. Being slow-paced, deliberate, and sequential, your brain type prefers doing things in a way that can appear to others as somewhat boring. But who cares, you do it right the first time and would rather take the time to be right than [be] the first one done!
One of my first memories of Dad is that his programming style was painful (to me) but his programs always worked the first time! (I was much more of an iterative programmer - try this, make a change, try that, make a change, etc. as I homed in on the solution.)