The Clutter Connection: How Your Personality Type Determines Why You Organize the Way You Do (From the host of HGTV’s Hot Mess House) (Clutterbug)

by Cassandra Aarssen

Let me assure you, there is no such thing as a naturally “lazy” or “messy” person.

All our lives, we are told how we should organize our homes and, indeed, our entire lives. It is presented to us as a one-size-fits-all program for a “neat and tidy” space to which we are all supposed to be able to easily adhere.

Our thoughts about ourselves shape our entire lives.

It’s time to stop trying to fix what doesn’t work and focus instead on what does!

Here is what this book is going to do for you: It will give you amazing insights into your own strengths and abilities.

I spent the majority of my life feeling messy, disorganized, frazzled, and like a total failure. I was always late, always broke, and always overwhelmed.

had also resigned myself to the idea that I was just a naturally messy person. I had spent the first twenty-eight years of my life believing the lie that I was just not good at cleaning and organizing. In fact, the perception I had of myself as a lazy and unproductive person was so deeply rooted, I always assumed I would fail even before I began a new task. Despite my willingness to change and many attempts to do so, I never really believed it would happen because I had failed so many times in the past.

And remember: Not everyone organizes the same way.

You are not messy, everyone just organizes differently.

This rarely works, and frequently causes this child to be scolded for being messy or lazy. Don’t get me wrong. Kids are messy, but this is different. As a parent, you need to look at yourself and the child critically and see how much is the messiness of youth, and what is due to her natural organizational type working against your expectations. Help her organize to her strengths and potential, to save your own sanity.

If something is hard or complicated to put away, you won’t do it. It’s not that you can’t do it. It just isn’t going to be a priority, and therefore it isn’t something that even enters your mind. You basically have organizational ADHD, but this isn’t a bad thing.

A Butterfly’s home needs to be designed to transform the one-minute rule into the five-second rule. The one-minute rule is, If something takes less than ONE MINUTE to do, you must do it immediately. For most Butterflies, if you can design a home where it takes less than FIVE SECONDS to put something away, they will have no excuses not to do it. For Bob’s home,