Piler, Filer, Tosser–What do your filing habits say about your personality?

Office supply giant Pendaflex commissioned a study of people’s filing habits, and discovered that you could learn a lot about a person by visiting his or her office.

Three main personality types emerged in the study:

Pilers accounted for 48 percent of office workers. Pilers can be identified by the stacks of paper on their desks and horizontal surfaces. Pilers confess to being “somewhat messy” at home, and unwind while watching baseball. They also boast the largest numbers of graduate degrees. Surprisingly, lawyers, accountants, and doctors, whom you might expect to be neatniks, are overwhelmingly pilers.

Filers make up 38 percent of workers, and can easily be identified by their uncluttered desks. Two thirds of filers say their homes are neat, too. They are most likely to describe themselves as managers, scientists, or technology workers. Filers rarely work in creative environments.

Tossers make up 14 percent of Pendaflex’s sample, and their neatness extends to their homes as well. Although they tend to have the least education of the three groups, they excel in leadership.

Apparently, each type has its risks. The pilers spend time looking for stuff (don’t I know that one!) that is easy for the filer to locate. Filers can be uncomfortably anxious about losing things. Tossers often toss important documents in their haste to stay clean.

Among the odder findings of the study (and one has to wonder why Pendaflex would care) are correlations between filing practices, political preferences, and pet choice.

According to the Pendaflex press release, Republicans are more likely to be filers, while over one-third of the pilers were Democrats. Tossers tended to vote as independents or for third parties. Pendaflex concluded that “Donkeys pile and Elephants file,” but according to my reading, 2/3 of the pilers are not Democrats. I’ve asked Sharon Mann of Pendaflex to clarify, and we’ll see what she says.

As far as pets go, the pilers seem to prefer dogs, and the filers cats. Tossers like birds. I have no response to that….

If you are a member of the organizationally challenged, Pendaflex offers a forum and other resources on their “I Hate to File” page.

These personality tests are all in good fun, but my guess is that they can be boiled down to two of the Big 5 dimensions–openness and conscientiousness. Both have been shown previously to vary according to political affiliation. A person who is open has wide intellectual interests and an active imagination. If you want to learn more about the Big 5, try Sanjay Srivastava’s page at the University of Oregon.