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!