You know who you are! Or do you? Read this article to find out if your system (or lack thereof) counts as disorganized to the extreme. It could be a garage crammed to the gills with four seasons of disheveled outdoor gear or a junk drawer that has taken the word “junk” to the extreme. Whatever the particulars, these are the signs to look out for when you suspect you’ve crossed the line between “messy” and “disorganized mess.”
Seven Habits Of Disorganised People
Disorganisation can be the scourge of the business world, and is often a silent assassin of productivity and profit. Sometimes, though, it’s motivating to see how our bad habits affect our lives. And remember, it’s never too late to make positive change. The following are 7 habits of disorganised people, and if you recognise yourself in any of them, get ready to make some changes.
1. Avoid Planning
If you dislike planning, you might be a disorganised person. Not having a plan is like setting off in a boat without any oars or a destination. You essentially allow yourself to get tossed around by whatever waves happen to pummel into you. Instead of waves, though, you’re hit by other people’s demands, your own distractions, and conflicting desires.Start by planning each day the night before. Think about what needs to be accomplished the next day and write it down. As you become more comfortable with planning, try looking at an entire week at a time and adjusting your expectations about what is really possible to achieve.
2. Succumb to Distractions
Disorganised people live in a world of distractions. Their phones make noises constantly, they’re always logged on to social media sites, and they check their email religiously. People around them know that they can always interrupt them, no matter how important or trivial the interruption is. Distraction keeps people from achieving their goals and focusing on what’s important.
To reverse the distraction curse, create boundaries for your time and work spaces. Turn off notifications from your phone during work hours, and check your email only at predetermined times. Inform the people around you that you will talk with them at certain times and that you need quiet work time the rest of your work day.
3. Multitask
We all know that multitasking is a myth, and yet many of us continue to convince ourselves that we really can prepare next week’s presentation while eating breakfast and chatting with our two best friends on Facebook. Multitasking is a key attribute of a disorganised person.If this is an issue that haunts you, try to work in cycles of 30-45 minutes at work, and follow each cycle with a short break. During each cycle, concentrate on focusing all of your energy and focus on that one activity. You will probably find that the quality of your work improves and that you accomplish more in less time.
4. Let Your Inbox Get Crowded
Do you have more than 100 emails in your inbox? Do you subscribe to countless email newsletters and get multiple notifications for social media sites every day? Disorganised people allow their communications to get out of control, and in this way, they miss important notices and communication because there’s just too much to keep track of!To turn this around, schedule 3 email checks per day. Spend 20 to 30 minutes during each of these checks processing your emails. In other words, finish up what needs to be done for each email and then delete it. Maybe you need to add something to your calendar: add it and delete the email. Maybe you need to call Jack in accounting. Call him, take care of the matter, and delete the email. Make your life easier by unsubscribing from as many email newsletters as possible.
5. Keep Everything in Your Head
You’ll totally remember that you promised your brother that you would help him with his yard work on Saturday. Right? With as much as you have on your plate, you’re not likely to remember the details of all the conversations and obligations you need to track.Write everything down. Keep an active calendar, and check it several times per day. Make shopping and errands lists, and cross things off as you accomplish them.
6. Scattering
Your tools and materials are everywhere, but that’s okay because you’ll be able to see them when you need them. The truth is that when your belongings are scattered, you waste a lot of time. Adopt the French concept of mise en place, and collect what you need ahead of time so that you have everything when you need it. Then, put everything back in its place when you’re done.
7. Failing to Prioritise
Getting to that meeting with your boss and calling your friend back are not equally important, but disorganised people seem to have a difficult time distinguishing the difference.
Causes of Being Disorganised
When you make your plan for the following day, prioritise each item. Which items MUST get done before the sun sets? Which items can be pushed off if necessary? Rank them by priority, and then stick to your decisions.
AM I JUST THE CREATIVE TYPE?
Blame it on being ‘born with a creative brain’? Creativity is not seen as a personality trait we are born with, but more of a skill we learn. Research has long shown that we are in fact all born creative. For example, researcher George Land followed 1,600 children way back in the 1960s. Using a ‘creativity test’, he discovered that 98% were ‘genius’ level at aged five. By adults, that had dropped to 2%. So it’s a skill we can also unlearn. Nor does creativity necessarily equate to disorganised. It just means you have to devise a way of organising that works for you. Which might, for example, be sorted piles of paperwork over everything alphabetised in a file folder.
SO I WASN’T BORN UNORGANISED?
We can actually be born with brains that have a different capacity for organisation than the norm. Someone with learning differences or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) might really struggle to be organised. Their brain does not naturally veer in that direction, or they have a strange way of organisation that others can’t understand.
A review on current treatments for adult ADHD published in the Journal of Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment points out that, “Spouses who do not have ADHD usually complain that their partner is unreliable, messy, disorganised.” But it’s not that those with ADHD have no sense of organisation. It’s just that they organise differently. For example, those with ADHD can think in circles, coming back to a topic after veering off in other directions, each time with new insight. If they are talking to someone who thinks in a very linear fashion, this might seem disorganised. But there is ‘order in the chaos’. Another thing that can happen with ADHD is ‘hyper focus’. You might have the messiest kitchen known to man. Then one day, you decide to tackle it, and end up with micro systems of organisation others haven’t even thought of. The trouble is that hyper focus tends to be badly timed. So you probably chose to deal with the kitchen on a day you had an important deadline, or lost track of time and forgot to pick the kids up from school.
MENTAL HEALTH AND ORGANISATION
Sometimes our brains are quite average, but environmental factors have led to us being a disorganised sort. In psychology, ‘environments’ refer to the people we interact with, and the experiences we live through. Things like family, teachers, and traumas influence how we see ourselves and the world. If our experiences are negative, the mental health issues that arise affect our behaviours, which can in some cases affect our ability to organise. So what are these mental health issues that might affect our disorganisation?
1. Low self-esteem. If we feel we are stupid, and not good enough to do things, then we don’t try. This can include trying to organise our life. Low self-esteem is also connected to what are called ‘limiting beliefs’. If we have a limiting belief that “I don’t deserve good things’, then we’ll create a life that ‘proves’ this belief true. This can mean having a messy house instead of a beautiful one we are happy in, or always being late so that others are angry instead of happy with us.
2. Depression. If you have suffered from depression in your life, you have probably noticed a direct correlation between the state of your house, finances, and career and the state of your moods. When we are depressed, our brain seems to shut down or dampen. It’s like a fog rolls in, and we can’t think clearly. And we suffer from fatigue. We are dialled down to low, and it takes twice as much effort to go half as far.
3. Anxiety. Anxiety is based on racing, increasingly illogical thoughts about your future. Your brain is so consumed by ‘what might happen’ that it can be hard to stay focussed on the life in front of you. You can make mistakes at work, forget to meet a friend, or just be disorganised in general.
4. PTSD and complex PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was first a diagnosis for soldiers, and those in emergency services. But we now know that PTSD is far more prolific, and can result from anything your brain decides to process as trauma. If you experienced ongoing trauma as a child, and now have PTSD-like symptoms, this can be referred to as ‘complex PTSD’. Research shows childhood trauma affects the way the brain develops. Trauma becomes a perfect storm when it comes to organisation. It can include both depression and anxiety, and symptoms of distraction that in some cases can lead to a misdiagnosis of ADHD.
5. Sleep problems. Lack of sleep or disrupted sleep leads to troubles thinking clearly, which then affects our organisation skills.
SO BEING DISORGANISED IS NOT MY FAULT?
Laziness” is often a misnomer. Nobody wants to suffer because they can’t keep their life organised enough to avoid things like unemployment, money issues, and loneliness. An average person manages to keep up, even if they spend hours playing video games or hanging out with their friends and have a messier house than most. If you can’t keep up with life, and you have upsetting experiences in your past you’ve never talked about or dealt with? Or suspect you have adult ADHD or learning differences? It’s worth looking at how they might be connected to always being disorganised, then reaching out for support.
Discover your personality type
This free personality test is based on Carl Jung’s and Isabel Briggs Myers’ typological approach to personality. Discover your personality type.
Upon completion of the personality assessment questionnaire, you will:
- Obtain your 4-letter type formula according to Carl Jung’s and Isabel Briggs Myers’ typology, along with the strengths of preferences and the description of your personality type, communication and learning style, behavior under stress.
- Discover careers and occupations most suitable for your personality type, along with examples of educational institutions where you can get a relevant degree or training,
- See which famous personalities share your type,
- Use the results of this test with the Jung Marriage Test™ to assess long-term compatibility with your romantic partner.
What is Personality Type?
According to Jung’s theory of psychological type, people can be characterized using the following three criteria:
- Extraversion – Introversion
- Sensing – Intuition
- Thinking – Feeling
Briggs Myers emphasized that the Judging – Perceiving relationship also influences characteristics of personality type…
| ESTJ | ISTJ | ENTJ | INTJ |
| ESTP | ISTP | ENTP | INTP |
| ESFJ | ISFJ | ENFJ | INFJ |
| ESFP | ISFP | ENFP | INFP |
Credits
https://www.harleytherapy.co.uk/. All rights reserved.
https://www.humanmetrics.com/personality
https://www.altusfinancial.com.au/