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How Well Do You Know Yourself?… The Secret to Your Personal Productivity

03/29/2012 By Nancy Borg With no comments yet

Not everyone is a self-actualized person.  It takes a very insightful individual to pay attention to who they really are.  I like to call this sixth sense, one’s life rhythm. Essentially, it is understanding what makes you tick.

We all approach life so differently in accordance with our own individual personality styles.  I have often blogged before about our unique learning styles and how these different modalities affect the way we understand organization, but I recently have realized that we must also factor in our general life rhythm. Are you in or out of sync with yourself?

Making a real connection with our consciousness will impact how we move through our lives and will organically affect our productivity. 

Let’s talk about stress. We all manage our anxiety levels in a discriminatory way.  Have you thought about how you handle pressure?  Are you a last-minute person, or do you like to prepare?  Do you delay making decisions, or do you cut to the chase?  Do you get a vicarious thrill from living on the edge, or do you play it safe? When you’ve answered  all of these questions, you will gain a keener sense of who you are, and discover if you are indeed in touch with your inner you.  There are so many layers to all of us, it is so very difficult to identify each and every one of them.

These triggers will formulate the patterns of one’s life organization.  I have seen time and time again from clients that no matter what organizational principles I implement, their natural personality style beats out any systematized solution I provide.  One client in particular, continuously stresses to me that she’s unlikely to prepare ahead of time for any meeting, manage her child’s readiness for after-school activities, or respond in a timely fashion to any social engagement.  She just shoots from the hip, and is very comfortable with that.  I’ve realized that her reaction to cause and effect is immediate.  This formula has always been her life rhythm and will always be.

From a personal perspective, although extremely organized, I understand that I function at my optimum, under extreme pressure.  As a college student and way beyond academic life, I have always preformed best under duress.  Somehow, whenever I leave myself with too much on my plate with too little time, I fully engage in the challenge of succeeding.  The cogs start to rapidly turn, my energy and commitment morph into high gear, and I recognize that I am fueled with the pressure of a deadline.  My organizational skills are heightened.  I know and understand that I perform best this way.

Certainly, there is no cookie cutter pattern to living an organized and productive life.  But before you can even attempt success, you must first really understand who you are at your core. Get in sync with yourself.

Identify your proclivities.  Work with your strengths and outsource your weaknesses.

Think about what feeds your productivity gene. Can you identify your life rhythm?

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Getting to Know The Master Organizer: Your Two-sided Brain

07/13/2011 By Nancy Borg With 1 comment

 

There is no cookie cutter design to organizing. Clearly, there are no two people alike and so there cannot be only one way to organize.  Everybody has their own preferred learning styles and processing modalities.  Let’s enter the Left and Right brain. We know that Right-brained people are creative, intuitive, emotional,  kinesthetic, and are usually visually oriented.  A Left-brain-er is more structured, cognitive, logical, precise, analytical, neat, and punctual.

For me, I switch back and forth depending on the task. In my workspace, I am very Right-brained. I like to keep most of my current files or notes out in the open and visible.  If I file them away or put them in a drawer,  I fear they will be forgettable, almost invisible to me.  And yet, at the end of the day, I still like to clear my desk and organize for the following day.  I can’t have papers scattered all over the place.  Very Left-brain.  But to ensure that things don’t get buried, I still feel compelled to leave some notes and files out on my desk.  Very Right-brain.

At home, I like to consider myself as the straighten up-er.  I love to put things away in their place, roaming around the house picking up random things and replacing back where they belong. Works for me, it’s my natural style to be neat and organized.   At yet, in other areas of my life, I’m back to Right-brain thinking. When it comes to putting things together, I rarely look at directions; I learn by doing, I’m kinesthetic.  I’m emotional and random, and sometimes I get so entrenched in what I’m doing, I lose all track of time.

We all have our own unique approaches of doing things and we must pay attention to how we learn, and how we function best. We should not have to adapt to any particular system to be a perfectly organized person.  You can’t fit a square peg into a circle. Whether you’re a visual, auditory, verbal, tactile, cognitive, kinesthetic, or someone who struggles with ADD, be aware that the brain is complex and completely individualized in terms of how it functions. In order to be a better YOU,  just be mindful of your strengths and allow them to work for you.

Do you SEE what I’m trying to say, or do you HEAR what I’m trying to say? What is your preferred style of thinking?  Are you a righty or a lefty?  I’d love to hear from you.

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