Cassandra Aarssen - The Clutter Connection: How Your Personality Type Determines Why You Organize the Way You Do

Also by Cassandra Aarssen

Real Life Organizing: Clean and Clutter-Free in 15 Minutes a Day
Cluttered Mess to Organized Success: Declutter and Organize Your Home and Life with over 100 Checklists and Worksheets

Copyright 2019 Cassandra Aarssen

Published by Mango Publishing Group, a division of Mango Media Inc.

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The Clutter Connection: How Your Personality Type Determines Why You Organize the Way You Do

Library of Congress Cataloging
ISBN: (p) 978-1-63353-856-6, (e) 978-1-63353-857-3
Library of Congress Control Number:
BISACPSYCHOLOGY / Personality
HOUSE & HOME / Cleaning, Caretaking & Organizing

Printed in the United States of America.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

To all those who have felt messy and disorganized their entire lives. I got you.

Table of Contents

H ave you ever wondered why your children just cant seem to put their toys away right or why your husband doesnt put his dirty clothes in the hamper, no matter how often you remind him? Perhaps you yourself struggle with clutter, cleaning habits, or productivity and have resigned yourself to the fact that you are simply lazy or just a messy person.

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

In this book, I will show you the real reason you struggle with clutter and simple solutions to overcome it.

Being naturally messy is a myth.
You are not messy,
everyone just organizes differently.

I am about to take you through a system for decoding your organizational style based on your unique personality. I will introduce you to the four different Clutterbugs, unpack each one in detail, and help you identify which one fits you best. I designed this system through my own journey from cluttered mess to organized success, based on my failure to use traditional organizing methods. I believed, in my heart, that I was a naturally lazy, messy person, and that striving for anything else was pointless. I am going to show you how I overcame my disorganization, just by discovering my true organizing style, and how you can do the exact same thing.

My business, Clutterbug, was born from my own lifelong struggle with clutter and disorganization. What began as my determination to get organized transformed into a blog, then a YouTube channel and, before I knew it, I was working with clients in my community and helping hundreds of thousands of families from all over the world to get organized. It was during this journey that I discovered something that would change everything about how we organize our homes.

I had stumbled upon the clutter connection . This is a simple truth that is absolutely universal. It is true for both the neat and clutter-free people for whom traditional organizing systems are effective, and the chronically cluttered people for whom organization is a seemingly impossible dream. The clutter connection is simply this: your clutter has nothing to do with your actual stuff. It really has everything to do with your personality type and how your brain works.

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.
Abraham Maslow

This book, however, is less about how to declutter your home and life and more about discovering and decoding why you struggle with clutter in the first place. The key to success lies in developing self-awareness about your personality and organizational type. Once you understand why you organize the way you do (or why you dont organize at all), you will no longer struggle with clutter and disorganization. You will easily identify organizational styles and strategies that complement your personality, rather than work against it. Knowing and appreciating what makes you unique will help you identify and resolve your clutter issues, from the inside out.

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. Even as children, we are told how to keep our desks, binders, and bedrooms neat and tidy and expected to conform to the one strategy for being clean and organized. When I was a kid, my mom was constantly telling me to clean up my messy room, despite the fact that I had sometimes just cleaned it. Clearly, my idea of clean did not match hers at all. My desk, binders, and locker were always a disaster at school. Over the years, I had countless teachers tell me that I was disorganized and messy because I couldnt seem to conform to the traditional way of keeping my things straight.

As a result of that constant messaging, from as far back as I can remember, I became conditioned to think of myself as a messy person. Think about your own life for a moment; has your own inability to conform to traditional organizing systems similarly led you to believe that you are a messy person?

The thing about negative thoughts such as these is that they often become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Our thoughts about ourselves shape our entire lives.

When it comes to organization, weve all been shoved into a square box, so to speak, despite the fact that some of us are very round.

Its time to think outside the box when it comes to organization!

Its time to stop trying to fix what doesnt work and focus instead on what does!

Im going to show you that, by simply knowing your organizing personality type, you will become happier, more organized, and much more productive. We are going to discover and identify your clutter connection.

Disclaimer: This book isnt going to be the usual self-help book. Im not going to pretend that I have some magic solution that will transform your life overnight, and Im certainly not going to pretend that I have my own life together. Im a total hot mess, but Im an organized hot mess.