Is your coworker’s desk organized or is it a mess? What does it tell you about a person? How do they eat their skittles? Do they sort them by colors or do they just grab a handful and go to town?

Do they keep a planner? Have a calendar? Or do they show up late? Always?

Do they think on their feet? Or do they need to set up deadlines for things to happen?

Sometimes, these are just quirks, but other times they are signs if someone is a Judger or a Perceiver.

Understanding how someone “goes through tasks” is vital for a harmonious workplace.

Let’s discuss the last letter, the Judging and Perceiving functions that identifies how you like to live your life.

As always, the Myers Briggs’ test is not meant to fully understand a person, but it is a good litmus test to view how different people work in the workplace and understand why they work and the way they work.

Am I a Judger?

People with the judging characteristic are not judgmental, but rather, judge how their life should be structured. They prefer decisions to be made and are very task oriented. They think sequentially, doing tasks until they are completed.

Am I a Perceiver?

Someone who falls into this category likes to keep things open including job opportunities, vacation opportunities, and likes to do things last minute. A notorious disadvantage for a perceiver is that they start things and never finish them (probably because there are so many things to start!)

There are plenty of articles on the internet that goes into this but they generally say the same thing: Judging is structural, Perceiving is amorphous.

Workplace Regime

So what works well in the workplace?

When you think of how hierarchical structures work in an organization, management needs to have the skills to set deadlines and organize information that can be presented to their superiors. They need to manage budgets, and need to manage expectations from the people beneath them.

In a hierarchical structure that is the workplace, they make the big bucks.

There is interesting speculation between MBTI types and how much people get paid. If you check the study, you can see that the upper 50% of the people who earn more money are in general, Judging types, with E—J personalities being the most lucrative of the personality types.

Why is that? Because to be able to externalize order to get things done is the most effective way to get stuff done. Most high earners in general, have to not only manage their direct reports but also have to inspire and communicate the vision effectively. It is very difficult for an introvert to naturally express the company vision and someone who is strong in Perceiving will be viewed by the organization as clueless and unorganized.

There are, of course, exceptions to the rules but in general, the most common leaders Judge.

So unlike the previous articles that argue that you need both aspects to be successful, to be really great at the workplace, Judging beats out perceiving by a long shot. So instead of preaching the need for both, the rest of the article is to convince Perceivers to get more organized.

How Perceivers can Prioritize and still Innovate

If you’ve been typed as a perceiver, don’t feel down because you won’t be able to ever make as much money as a Judger. The Perceiver has the power to innovate much faster than the Judger because the general nature of the Perceiver is to think of solutions on the spot. In fact, if you are a Perceiver, maybe more money or more work isn’t even interesting to you! After all, more money, more problems.

Being creative is hard as a Judger. It goes against the grain to break the mold, and that’s where the perceiver comes in. Though there are plenty of judging people who are very creative, their method for creativity is vastly different from perceivers and because they are judging, they have an easier time to create because they see things through!

However, most Perceivers ignore deadlines, they show up late to things, and they generally are very disorganized. This makes them insufferable to work with, especially in times of crisis.

Do note, that to succeed in the workplace, you must follow rules. You must follow timelines and you must follow instructions. That is the rules. But perhaps you need to think of it differently.

A good example of a Perceiver who has to use Judging tactics to get work done is Adam Savage from MythBusters. I’ve recently finished his book Every Tool is a Hammer and it’s the perfect book to teach someone creative how to be organized. Adam used to hate organizing tools, making checklists, creating deadlines, and managing management, but he realized the only way to get stuff done fast is to implement these things.

As a perceiver myself, I used to fall into the trap of having too many ideas, my desk being mess, and not being organized and sometimes, it shows.

However, I’ve trained myself to get work done. Here’s a few steps that helped me:

Writing Down Deadlines

We launch a podcast every Monday and I tell my coworkers to give me specific tasks at specific dates to get things done on time.

Putting and especially writing down deadlines makes it possible to anchor a specific task, complete it, and then move on to the next one. It allows you to structure the big goal with a set of small goals.

This specific strategy is very useful for tackling really big projects such as developing a product or completing your new year’s resolution.

Routines

According to the book, the Power of Habit, it takes 6 weeks to solidify a habit and this is done through routine. A repetitive motion that happens that is usually accompanied by either a reward or avoiding a punishment.

For My Food Job Rocks, I’ve implemented it as a way to discipline myself. I would publish an episode a week, with the reward of being recognized, and avoiding the punishment of people asking for an episode.

I’ve missed a couple of newsletters and articles in the past (recently) but establishing a fear of not posting helps keep you on course.

Projects from Start to Finish

The issues most creative Perceivers suffer with is not completing any of their projects. Sometimes I ask a fellow entrepreneur what they’ve been working on and I get 3 projects thrown into my face. After a month, I ask about it, 3 more new projects happen and the old ones die.

As a product developer, our goal is to create food products but these food products can take a couple of years for them to fruition! To stick to a project is vital to the growth of a creative. You have to see things through because that is the value of understanding the whole process. Not only that, but seeing a project all the way through allows you to replicate and modify the process again and again.

But what if a project never ends like the podcast? A good rule of thumb is then to optimize the process enough where you can then expand the offerings. For creative people, your job is to create enough free time to use that time to create even more value.

Cognitive Functions

Unlike Sensing, Intuition, Thinking and Feeling, there is no Extraverted Judging or Introverted Perceiving. Instead, the J and P functions have the ability to prioritize the functions. In the MBTI list, Judging shifts the T and F functions to be the primary functions, and Perceiving shifts the S and N functions to be the primary function.

Though it’s hard to find some article that blatantly explains what that means, when you look at all of the personality types’ cognitive functions as a whole map, you will see a pattern.

(From Nerdy Creator: Who offers a very good perspective on Cognitive Functions as well)

The difference between an ENTP and an ENTJ is that an ENTP will focus on Extroverted Intuition while a ENTJ will focus on Extroverted Thinking. Based on previous articles, this makes both types drastically different.

Overall, the J and P functions for a cognitive function tells a theory: that people who have judging characteristic focus on Thinking and Feeling because the goal of a Judging function is to focus on how they shape the world and then use S and N to accomplish their task, while the P function focuses on Sensing and Intuition first because Perceiving people gather information on how others shape the world, and then use T and F to make decisions on how they want to contribute.

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This article is part of the Myers Briggs in the Workplace Series. If you’d like to learn more about the different functions, see the links below:

Introversion versus Extroversion

Intuition versus Sensing

Thinking versus Feeling

Judging versus Perceiving