How ENFP Personality Types (Pixie Type: Organic) Tackle Home Office Clutter

We don’t mean to sound judgmental, but if you don’t have a home office and you’re past adolescence, you need one. Let us elaborate: a home office need not be an entire room (although we love looking at the gorgeous home office decorating ideas on Pinterest in our spare time!), but more of a space where the basic elements of life and home organization happen. A corner of any room but the dining room (‘Don’t work where you eat’) will suffice. Just add a desk, a wall calendar, a filing cabinet, a wastebasket or shredder, and a few other items particular to each personality type, and you’ll be set.

When one thinks of ENFP personality types (Organic Pixie types), somehow the idea of a home office almost becomes, well, laughable. Here’s why: ENFP people are not known to be the most detail-oriented folks, and home offices can seem, to them, super anal retentive spaces for their more traditionally organized counterparts. This is where we come in: In this article, we will outline exactly how you can tackle your home office clutter and make this space work for you, rather than ignore it altogether.

ENFP Personality Types

The letters ENFP stand for Extraverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiving. What does that mean? It means ENFP personality types are:

• Energized by their interactions with others
• More interested in concepts and ideas rather than details and facts
• Make decisions based on feelings and values
• Value spontaneity and flexibility over planning and organizing

If these folks aren’t naturally inclined to organize, is there hope for them? Indeed there is, and you’ll see how in the following paragraphs. In the meantime, a bit of Myers Briggs background. Myers Briggs Personality Theory is based on the theory of personality created by famous psychologist Carl Jung:

“Perception involves all the ways of becoming aware of things, people, happenings, or ideas. Judgment involves all the ways of coming to conclusions about what has been perceived. If people differ systematically in what they perceive and in how they reach conclusions, then it is only reasonable for them to differ correspondingly in their interests, reactions, values, motivations, and skills.

We created our four pixie types using this 16 type theory. Particular traits of the ENFP personality type include the following:

• Curious
• Observant
• Energetic
• Enthusiastic
• Good communicators
• Imaginative
• Creative
• Warm
• Insightful
• Spontaneous
• Possibility focused

These types will most likely be wonderful dinner party guests or community theater members, but what about their organizational strengths and weaknesses? What happens when it comes to running a home and organizing one’s life? This is where our pixie type system comes into play.

Organic Pixie Types

Our pixie type equivalent to the ENFP Myers Briggs type is called ‘Organic’. These types have the most difficulty letting go of ‘stuff’ — whether it be that milk in the fridge that ‘may still be good’ or that one sock whose mate never seems to appear (but might one day!). Organic pixie types are also much more attached to sentimental items than the rest of the types. What does this particular mode of attachment mean? It means that ENFP, or Organic pixie types, have some serious organizational stumbling blocks. However, this doesn’t mean there is no hope for them. On the contrary! Below is a list of Organic organizational habits and traits:

• Need to keep things out in the open rather than hidden
• Have visual memories
• Pile things
• Not always detail-oriented
• Make physical or mental to-do lists, depending

An Organic pixie type has a few organizational challenges to work with, which include their inability to let go of sentimental items, their tendency to ignore or overlook important details, making (many) random piles, procrastinating, and over analyzing organizational issues. This last one is a bear, because it leads to organizational paralysis. When an Organic is faced with the task of tackling home office clutter, there are a few rules he/she ought to adopt (and by this we mean, cling to for dear life)!

Home Office Organization for the ENFP

Think home offices are for more traditional Classic pixie types only? Wrong! ENFP personality types (Organic pixie types) have just as much of a chance at creating a smoothly-run home office as the next person, as long as they follow these simple rules:

• Filing cabinets, if insisted upon, must be used for long-term storage only: These closed storage organizing systems frequently do not work for ENFP types, just because these folks have extremely visual memories. This makes things that are out of sight, out of mind — often forever. If you must have a filing cabinet, use it for papers that you need to save but not reference.
• Keep piles contained, and use only for current projects: This means use transparent, labeled inboxes or shallow bins to store your piles. This way, papers be easier to identify and locate.  
• Get an inbox and clean it out on a monthly basis: The inbox can be a wall hanging folder or a tiered bin on the desk — it just needs to be updated, or cleared of miscellaneous, irrelevant stuff regularly.
• Get a calendar and a To Do list: The bigger and brighter the calendar, the better. Hang it on your wall and reference it regularly. Get a nice legal pad or a notebook and keep a running To Do list. Keeping these will become habitual and essential in your
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