A Florida woman makes three 911 emergency calls to report that her local McDonald’s ran out of McNuggets. We call her “a frivolous waste of taxpayer money.”

A Washington man argues for a national boycott or lawsuit because Wendy’s charges 70 cents more to upgrade a double cheeseburger to a combo meal than to upgrade a fish sandwich to a combo meal. We call him “a loser with nothing better to do.”

A South Korean couple spends 10 hours a day at an internet cafe raising a virtual child, while their real baby starves to death at 5.5 pounds. We call them “criminally negligent.”

Yes, it’s very easy to judge them. But are these people really any different from us?

I know you want to say yes (I sure do), but what exactly makes them different from you? If you had been given the same genes and the same experiences, wouldn’t you have made the same decisions? If nature and nurture are the same, what else can be different?

Effort seems to be a big factor in how we judge others. We expect them to exercise discretion in matters we think they should be able to control, while giving them a pass on things they can’t help. Which of these judgments do you agree with?

• “It’s not his fault he’s epileptic; we can’t blame him for striking someone during a seizure.”
• “It’s not his fault he’s ugly; we can’t blame him for looking like that.”
• “It’s not his fault he’s weak; we can’t blame him for not being able to lift much weight.”
• “It’s not his fault he’s crabby; we can’t blame him for not smiling much.”
• “It’s not his fault he’s addicted to food; we can’t blame him for overeating.”
• “It’s not his fault he’s stupid; we can’t blame him for thinking you can take fireworks on a plane.”
• “It’s not his fault he’s lazy; we can’t blame him for sitting back and doing nothing.”
• “It’s not his fault he’s evil; we can’t blame him for being a serial killer.”

But who decides what we should be able to control? Maybe it’s naturally easy for one person to be friendly, another person to be honest, and another person to be brave. How much credit can you get for just doing what comes naturally?

Calvin (Hobbes’ six-year-old buddy) said that Santa’s naughty and nice list is unfair, because Santa doesn’t judge people on a curve. Susie likes performing good deeds, but Calvin hates them, so he has to work a lot harder. Shouldn’t one of his good deeds count as much as ten of hers?

Do you judge people by their house, their car, their clothes, their job, their looks, their intelligence, their personality, their friends, their family, or anything else? Of course you do. We all do. But why?

Photo by Sudhamshu

I’ve just finished week 4 of my Myers-Briggs trials. This week focused on judging.

I had mentioned before that I don’t have a strong preference for perceiving, so using some judging wasn’t too hard, and this was definitely the easiest of the four trials. However, it was still hard to deviate much from my natural preferences.

I tried to concentrate on the best aspects of judging: being organized and checking items off my todo list. Perceivers, particularly intuitive perceivers, tend to think up a lot of ideas that don’t get done. And I do suffer from out of control todo lists.

I have a day planner that I write some things down on, in case I get an idea when I’m not with my computer. But I mainly work from a todo list on my computer, which is 537 lines. That doesn’t mean 537 separate tasks, because some tasks have details that take more than one line, and I also have some blank lines between groups of tasks, but it’s still a lot. I have a separate todo list just for my blog, which is 1,098 lines. I also play with various todoodlists.

Anyway, with this many different tasks to choose from, it’s sometimes hard to just pick one thing and do it. This week I got into the habit of starting each day by working on a big project, and saving other stuff for later. I’m not really a morning person, so it’s not that I have more energy earlier in the day, but whatever I work on first will definitely get done.

I try to check email and read blogs later in the day, since that kind of stuff tends to expand to fill the time available. I also try to add items to the end of my todo lists rather than the beginning whenever possible. I have a hard time with that because I like to do stuff while it’s fresh in my mind, but there’s just not time to do everything.

I still find perceiving more fun because I’d rather be spontaneous than scheduled, but it’s hard to argue with the results you get from being organized.

I read Dave Navarro’s What’s Holding You Back? to get some productivity tips. I really liked it, and I’ll write a review soon. I’ll also write another post to recap this whole experiment.

In the fourth and final week of my Myers-Briggs trials, I’ll be focusing on judging.

Judging and perceiving are kind of hard to explain, and they can be looked at in a few different ways, but one way is that judgers are more like type A personalities, while perceivers are more like type B. The type A/B theory has been heavily criticized and is considered obsolete, but at least you have an idea of what I mean. As with all the other preferences, neither judging nor perceiving is better than the other. (The words unfortunately sound like judgmental and perceptive, but that’s not what they’re about.)

I expect this to be the easiest one because I’m a “split P.” I didn’t get numerical results when I took the MBTI, but they underlined my P to indicate a not-so-clear preference. I was also the only one in the P group at the workshop who insisted on using the right color M&Ms when making a blueprint of a house (like using brown for a table, instead of mixed random colors). Apparently, judgers always pay attention to M&M color, while perceivers usually don’t.

I also got a head start on this because I’ve been trying to make better use of my time in my mini-retirement. I find that even though I’m not working, I don’t have that much more free time. For one thing, I’m now getting 8 hours of sleep a night instead of 4.

So I’ve been trying to be more careful with managing my time instead of just doing whatever. I thought I had unsubscribed from a bunch of blogs, but I just checked and I’m still subscribed to 92, so I don’t know what happened. While reading blogs is fun, it’s easy to spend more time online than you’d like to.

I figure now is a great time for me to read Dave Navarro’s What’s Holding You Back? Beat The Seven Success Killers That Everyone Struggles With. I bought it in June but haven’t read it yet, which I think is pretty ironic considering the subject matter.

Productivity is not strictly a hallmark of judgers, and in fact someone with a sensing/perceiving combination is usually very action-oriented (though perhaps not that organized). But for me, an intuitive/perceiving thinker and daydreamer, I think paying attention to productivity is bound to make me use my judging side. At the very least, putting this ebook in my schedule is showing judging already.

Looking forward to a week of organization, structure, and responsibility. Go judgers!