First of all, make up your mind you are not going to allow failure knock on your door any more. When you hear the knock, just don't answer that door. Quit giving in so easily. Do you think others like your mess? Does it encourage others to want to come to your humble abode or be around you? The answer is absolutely no! It sends a terrible message and usually impacts other parts of your life too.

1. Since always, I've always been somewhat of a walking hurricane. Anything i touch or interact with has a tendency to become disorganized and, well, messed up. That's how i earned family nickname - walking chaos.

Basically, I am seeking advice on how to actually pay attention to things around me, how to get some structure in my home regarding all the things i gather and pile up around me. I need every bit of advice regarding all aspects of life - cooking, tidying up, deciding what to throw out or burn and what to keep. Also, I have good deal of knowledge about it, I'm mostly seeking the ways of implementing it.

Any software/ spreadsheet/ empirical conclusions would o, and I would prefer getting advice from intuitives since I believe it's the common problem (for INTPs mostly).

Answer: You need to find an incentive to do it. No one here can give you that. You have to ask yourself what you find important about being neat and organized, and put it in direct opposition to what motivates you to stay a slob.

If you want my opinion, you should just work on delaying your gratification. INTP's are prone to low frustration tolerance. Usually, when faced with something unpleasant or mundane, they will look for something to stimulate them in a more favorable way. Instead of focusing on just cleanliness, why don't you focus on schooling your executive functioning a bit? When you sit down to a task, don't let yourself get up from it until its done. Stay with the discomfort. As you build up this pact with yourself, you'll be able to keep more promises... including being able to keeping your space clean and orderly.

All the time you spend doing nothing, and being bored could be spent organizing, cleaning and wiping (whatever) It's all about self-DICIPLINE! You gotta force your legs to move to the vents and get the clorox to clean the mold, the dust, and the mice. Most of it's a one time clean, then you've gotta kind of categorize to the best of your judgement. Whatever makes your life easier.

I used to be a self help junkie and I used to buy these affirmation CD's from a company called Think Right NOW. I forgot the name but they had one for getting organized. I listened to it one night while sleeping, and I swear the next day I was the most anal organized person in the world. I spent the whole day organizing and cleaning up messes. The only thing is if I quit listening to it - the effects wore off. I nicknamed it my ISTJ CD. I listened to it a few times after and ws just as anal.

I'm not big into affirmations and positive thinking type stuff anymore because the effects are only temporary. Now when I want to clean or get organize I just do releasing from a program called the Sedona Method. It came from a guy named Lester Levenson - and there is a similar program called The Release Technique. You can apply releasing to any area of your life you want to improve. I find it alot easier and simpler than the positive thinking approach.

All right, so you want to keep the area neat and tidy for the sake of your mate. Is that enough to keep you motivated? I suspect that it isn't, otherwise you wouldn't be asking for advice about it. You have demonstrated that you don't care whether you keep things in order or not. You got to find stronger motivation than that. Or find some way to get yourself fed up about your mess at a personal cost to you in order to change it.

That's just basic human behavior. We move away from what we internalize as 'bad' and move towards what we internalize as 'good.'

Attack core of the behavior, and you're more likely to make a change.

I think the 'secret', if there is one, is indeed related to tapping into your inner self. It's only when I'm running late, looking around desperately for my shoes and car keys that I really "see" my mess everywhere. Suddenly I'm disgusted with the house and will even take the time to straighten things out when I should have been out the door 30 minutes before. I won't share my exploding milk container story, but its outcome does convince me that I need stress to put me in the right frame of mind to clean/organize/declutter. Otherwise I'm just a daydreaming machine. I'm so glad you covered this topic.

It's not about motivation, it's about me not knowing how exactly I am supposed to do it. No matter how hard i try, things always get to their previous state one way or the other. To be more precise, I have an impression that there is always same amount of messiness around me, and that all I succeeded in is to shift it around.

Also, the dust keeps piling up with incredible speed no matter how often I dust. It's like being pranked with the same joke over and over.

By motivation, I mean 'internal motivation.' You know, the sort that is essentially a value that becomes a habit of behavior. If you internalized the value of being 'clean' as opposed to 'messy,' you probably wouldn't let it get to that state of messiness in the first place.

But in order for 'cleanliness' to become a value of yours, you need to figure out what's going to keep you motivated to make it one.