50 Times People Encountered Perfectly Organized Things And Just Had To Document Them

McMenamin's 10+ year experience in the organizing business has taught her that the second half of the population, the 'pilers', are not untidy. They just have differently wired brains. "I learned that there's usually a rhyme and a reason to any mess or pile," she writes. "Often, a slew of piles masks a simple organizing strategy: a rudimentary piling system."

The professional organizer describes how she helps the 'pilers’. "I build a piling system that replicates the essence of their natural piling strategy while creating more visual order and efficiency than was there beforehand. I figure out how many piles or categories tend to occur and buy clear, open bins for each and label them."

What's the reasoning behind the organizing method that 'pilers' prefer? Essentially, there's no visually pleasing element. There are no satisfying well-organized spice racks, bookcases are not color-coded. So how can they enjoy the messy order?

McMenamin writes that it's because the 'pilers' are visual thinkers. They find it hard to locate things once they're away from their sight. In some cases, people even forget that they had an item they hadn't thought about in a long time. For those who prefer piling organizational systems, cabinets are places where things go to rest and never see the light of day again.

It's true, piling systems don't look Instagrammable. They probably would never make it into a list like this. Yet they work for a huge portion of the human population. "There is no point to me creating an entire new system for a client that looks pristine with everything tucked away inside of a filing cabinet if it's not going to actually work for them," McMenamin concludes in her blog post.