Mental Organization

Unclutterer poses a very simple hypothesis:

If you understand the way you tend to process information, you can better select tools, practices and habits that work with your nature rather than against it.

Thats tough to argue with, so intrigued, I read on. The first post in a two part article gives you a series of clues to help you identify if you are a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic / tactile processor. As the names imply, the question is if you best relate to information through hearing, seeing, or doing / touching.

I am a very Kinesthetic processor, with a good dose of auditory. Almost nothing on the visual.

This Series of questions and their results reminded me of one of the topics discussed during my JCIPrime seminar (As an aside, JCI Prime is an incredible seminar, if you have to do presentations for any purpose in your daily life, I think its very valuable. Look for your local Jaycees chapter and go to their meetings, they are a great group of future leaders!..that link is for the U.S. Jaycees, in other countries, follow this link ). At that seminar, we talked about the interactive person, the one that wants to do or participate in order to learn. As a habitual back-row-of-the-class kind of student, I assumed that this was definitely not me. I was wrong. My tendency toss the manual aside and want to mess with something until I figure it out is a perfect example of this kind of learner. I think the fact that I scored so low on the visual is also an indicator of why I toss that manual aside.

In the second part of the article, the author goes on to tell you different techniques that will work for you depending on the way process information. Most of it didn’t apply to me (I manage to resist the urge to play with my designer toys that are all over my desk unless I am deep in concentration). I so tend to pace a lot when thinking, but doing that in cubicle land will make me look sort of insane. But I will definitely look into implementing a lot of those recommendations the next time I redesign my home workspace (especially the adjustable height desk). Just as interesting is what hasn’t worked for me, that I see under visual. So THAT’S why I never really got into google calendar and snapping pictures of stuff with the cellphone cam even though I understood how helpful they could be. They weren’t helpful for me.

Either way I recommend you check out the two posts, and see if there is anything there that can help you be more productive!