Are You SMART STRUCTURE?

Elisabeth Moss as SMART STRUCTURE Peggy Olson, "Mad Men"Felicity Huffman as SMART STRUCTURE Lynette Scavo, "Desperate Housewives"Cynthia Nixon as SMART STRUCTURE Miranda Hobbes, "Sex and the City"

If you identify with being a SMART but prefer to live your life in a scheduled and structured way. You feel better once things are settled and the plan is decided and you are stressed out by last minute plans and stresses. What's easiest for you is scheduling and organization, what's hardest is dealing with clutter and the unpredictability of home and life issues.

What's Easy

• You are very good at the big picture and value quality and function, which translates into an inviting, yet sometimes a more austere design sense than your ORGANIC counterparts. Your furniture, artwork, tchotchkes, and books are often trophies or testament to your accomplishments. You have more books than any other type.
• What separates you from your SMART FREEDOM counterparts is that you like to create structure and order in your world. Details can also overwhelm you, but you deal with this by creating lists that you go through and cross off in a linear fashion.
• You are a good planner and have embraced the scheduler and calendar so that details don’t fall by the wayside.
• You are a good cook who plans and shops in advance and follows recipes.
• Even on vacation, unless you are going to the beach, you love a good itinerary. And if you’re going somewhere — it’s the destination that matters not the road less traveled. You would race through paradise if the goal were to cross the Pacific.
• You actually can leave the dishes until the morning, but then they must be done morning, it’s an overnight rule.

What's Hard

• It is much harder for you to relax when there is a mess of dishes in your kitchen, but since you are a visual big picture thinker, you can ignore the details of a dirty kitchen when you can't SEE it, but eventually your logical nature will attend to the detail.
• You are always amazed when visiting your CLASSIC friend; she picks up your coffee cup after you're finished and gets it into the dishwasher. It’s a detail you could never attend to in the real world. And there’s no reason to. Life should be easy.
• When planning, you don’t feel settled until once all the details are finished and attended to.
• Filing in file cabinets and any organizational structure that is enclosed and not visual. And you need to have your piles out in the open or you forget they are there.
• Clutter will always be a lifelong struggle. As structured as you are, you have a keenly developed visual sense that means you need to have lost of things out in the open, which of course means clutter.
• Being on time. Yes, with your outer-world orientation you’d think you would always be on time, but your big picture perceiving function can get in the way of the details inherent in the concept of time. You aren’t as leisurely as you ORGANIC FREEDOM (NP) and FUN (SP) counterparts, but it can make your life harder.
• Not breaking the finer things like china & crystal. You tend to break things more than CLASSIC and FUN types. It’s a detail thing. Buy and treat housewares accordingly.