What is your brain style?

Source: yasmeanie

With all types of organizing, there has to be some common foundation for the process. For example, one way is through color. This is probably one of the most popular ways since most people are very visual. The idea is that you assign each color a certain meaning, and then organize according to your perimeters. I do this with my home office files-- red is auto, blue is banking, yellow is utilities, etc.

Another way of organizing is through numbers. Just like color, each section of what you are organizing has a certain number attached to it. This can also be applied to shapes, fabrics, letters or any identifier that readily stimulates your memory.

The key to organizing for YOU is understanding the way YOUR brain works.

I remember when I started my accounting job. All of the spreadsheets were already created by someone else and I was adding onto them. For the life of me, I could not read them. I would get confused and frustrated and put numbers in the wrong spots, create columns that already existed, etc. (Which, for an accountant, is really bad stuff!) But to the person before me, they made perfect sense. That is because we had different brain styles.

My brain is pretty focussed in that it basically only responds to color and shape. Like when I read a magazine, I never actually read it. I look at the pictures and read the big quotes pulled from the articles, but that's about it. I am drawn to the visual. When I took my accounting spreasheets and made them look beautiful, with proper spacing and color identifiers, everything fell into place and undstanding them became easy.

Others of you are on the opposite spectrum. If you actually made it to this point in the blog by reading every word, that is a good sign that you are one of these who focus on the meaning of things and are more detail-oriented. You can organize with words and numbers and do not need the visual stimulation to stay on top of things. This doesn't mean you don't enjoy things looking beautiful, but you don't NEED it. For this type of person, organizing can actually be quite easy because a few stark white labels with "Times Roman" wording written on them might be all you need to function. How nice for you ;-)

There are others ways a brain can respond: through sound or touch or even emotion. They key is to find which one of these you identify with most and then create your own "organizing style". If you can successfully do this, you might manage to stick with keeping things organized instead of jumping from system to system and always feeling like nothing you do is working.

Take a moment and examine the way you think. Do you need colors to help your brain out? Do you need to use pictures of hearts, kitty cats and newborn babes because you are emotionally driven? How about different textures and patterns to keep your stuff in order? Or maybe words and numbers speaks clearest in your mind.

Follow your brain's natural pattern to success.