How tidy are Spanish people – and are Brits better or worse?

ARE Spanish people generally organised, or are the international stereotypes about their supposed flakiness and absent-mindedness true? They often cite the 'famous British punctuality and order', but many Brits would agree that's a bit of a myth, too – or is it just that Spaniards think Brits are organised in comparison to themselves?

Swedish furniture giant Ikea decided to find out.

Its Time and Order study, carried out with the help of Spanish market research company Sigma Dos (so nobody can accuse them of cultural bias) interviewed a stratified sample of 5,300 Spanish nationals living in Spain (as in, residents of non-Spanish extraction, and Spaniards living abroad, were not included).

'Stratified', for clarification, means the proportion of interviewees selected was designed to reflect a microcosm of real demographics in the society being studied – such as, X% of people over 65, X% of men versus women, and so on.

Areas covered included, do Spanish people lose things often, and do they tend to lose the same things again and again, such as odd socks, mobile phones and keys? What is the emotional effect of misplacing something? How long does the average Spaniard spend looking for something they've mislaid or, worse, lost irretrievably?

 

How long Spaniards spend looking for lost items in a lifetime

Taking Spain's current life expectancy of 82 years (about 81 for men and 83 for women at present, but set to rise to over 90 by the year 2030), Ikea worked out a typical Spaniard spends 4,683 hours, from birth until death, searching for misplaced items.

Assuming you wouldn't mislay anything until you're about five years old – after all, you wouldn't have much of an idea where it's supposed to go before then, but by your early school years, you could well discover you've left your PE kit in the cloakroom or lost one of your felt-tips after lending it to a classmate – this means a total of 77 years (before age 82) in which you're likely to lose things.

Also, by the mid-late 80s and early 90s, when old-age-related dementia may well be setting in, losing everyday items is far more common and would skew the figures.

In terms of days, those 4,683 hours, then, total 195 days and three hours, or a total of six-and-a-half months, assuming Spaniards start looking for a lost item on New Year's Day, keep searching around the clock without sleeping, and find it on June 14.

The reason for losing six-and-a-half months of their lives looking for mislaid items is because almost half of all Spaniards interviewed admitted to doing so at least once a week, and three in 10 Spanish people lose things three or more times a week.

About six in 10 say it takes them an average of 10 minutes to find whatever they've misplaced, although one in five says they spend around 20 minutes – giving a total of around one hour, six minutes a week spent searching, two days, nine hours and 40 minutes a year, and 195 weeks in a lifetime.

Women lose things and spend longer looking for them than men – seven months and six days in a lifetime, compared with five months, three weeks and three days.

But the research is based upon self-report, so it could be that men do not admit to losing things as much, that women believe they are more absent-minded than they really are, or that women spend time looking for things men lose (or overestimate how much time they do, in fact, waste on looking for items men misplace).

 

All that extra time to have fun...

According to Ikea's head of research Ana García, the aim of the exercise is to 'shed light and tachographs' on tidiness or lack of in the average household.

“If we didn't lose things all the time, we'd have six-and-a-half extra months in our lives to spend on other, more valuable activities,” she points out.

What a pity we don't get those six-and-a-half months all in one hit.

“We know, for example, that the average Spanish person spends 46,000 hours [1,916 days and 16 hours, or approximately five years and three months] of our lives on leisure activities. Wouldn't it be marvellous if we had another nearly 5,000 hours to add to those?”

 

Anxiety levels: Being tidy is good for your health

And it could be better for our health, too, Sra García points out.

Depending upon what you've mislaid, where, and the point in time when you mislay it, it can be incredibly stressful – of course, our organism doesn't flood with the same amount of cortisone when we can't find a pen we had 30 seconds ago at our desks, since we can just fetch another one, as when we turn the house upside down searching for an expensive piece of jewellery of sentimental value and conclude it must have fallen off us in the street; searching for keys we knew we had in our handbags because we must have used them to drive to where we are isn't as bad as discovering you don't have your door key, it's the early hours of the morning, freezing cold outside, and you can't get into your home.

But it all adds up – even those 'micro-stresses' produce tiny drops of cortisone, which accumulate to put pressure on the organism when it happens often enough.

In fact, 50% of Spaniards interviewed said they experience stress and anxiety when they cannot find something they need or want.

“Keys and mobile phones are the items that cause the most stress when we lose them, because they're [no pun intended] key everyday items,” explains Ana García.

Mislaying stuff also affects personal relationships. Losing something of value in the house can lead people to unfairly accuse visitors of theft. Families can end up arguing when they accuse each other of putting something somewhere it doesn't go.

“Half of all those interviewed admitted to having argued with someone over a lost item,” Sra García says.

 

What mainly gets lost?

Items Spaniards are most likely to misplace are pens (86.8% of them do regularly), spectacles (86.1% - always check the top of your head before starting the search), mobile phones and keys (82.6% each) and, in terms of clothing, tops or sweaters (53%) and socks or underwear (47%).

One presumes the latter refers to items inside the home – and especially as coats and jackets are not listed, when these may seem an obvious candidate if taken off and hung up somewhere whilst out.

 

Who's the tidiest of them all?

Whether or not Spanish people are tidy and organised is difficult to assess objectively, but their own perception of their skills in this area show that most believe they are. A total of 77% said they were tidy people, and only 22.4% said they are messy and chaotic.

Those who most claimed to be neat and tidy – perhaps a generational issue, as they may have been brought up to believe a messy home is a sign of laziness or failure – are the over-65s, as well as those who live in homes of at least 120 square metres (a typical four-bedroom apartment or a small detached villa), and those who do not have children; in the latter two cases, they may be right, since small spaces may give the appearance of being more cluttered than larger ones with the same amount of mess but spread out over a wider area, and those without young children will not have to contend with toys all over the floor or larger piles of washing up and discarded clothing.

But on the flip side, these three groups confessed to spending the most time looking for lost items.

Perhaps this is because they care more about finding them, or actually notice they are lost – those who are generally untidy may just shrug and decide 'it'll turn up at some point'.

Or maybe the oft-cited maxim of disorganised people – that their surroundings look like a bomb-site, but they do know where everything is – is, in fact, true.

Those who considered themselves the least organised were the under-55s, those who lived in homes of less than 90 square metres (typically a large two-bed or average three-bed apartment, or a small townhouse) and those with children under six.

Yet these profiles were also among those who recognised they spent the most time looking for lost items.

 

How does this compare with British people?

How much of all this is cultural? Well, a study in March 2019 published in British broadsheet The Independent found that UK native residents are 'too busy' to clean their homes, that only 38% managed to 'squeeze in a bit of cleaning up at the weekends', about the same percentage carried out a 'spring clean', and 45% believed previous generations had more time on their hands for domestic chores.

Six years earlier, a similar study in The Telegraph found 70% of Brits described their homes as 'a pigsty' because they 'never had time for tidying up' - but a survey by AppliancesDirect a year ago found the average Brit spent over seven hours a week clearing up.

Some of the latter contradiction was thought to be the result of influential figures such as Marie Kondo on the Netflix show Tidying Up With Marie Kondo – to the point where the neatest and most organised age group of all in the UK is said to be the so-called 'Generation Z', or those between 18 and 24.

Another survey by eSure home insurance showed that British people spend 10 minutes a day searching for lost items – keys, mobile phones, glasses and books being the most common – whilst four in 10 have arguments about things going missing, UK residents lose up to nine items a day, and one in 10 admits to regularly forgetting where they parked their car.

In a lifetime – cited by eSure as 60 years and six months – the average Brit spends 3,680 hours or 153 days looking for things they have lost.

And 0.5% said they spend more than an hour every day hunting missing things.

Unlike in Spain, men were said to be far worse than women at losing items – a third of female partners and spouses of British men say these 'regularly' mislay bits and bobs.

If the number of hours spent searching in 60.5 years were to be increased in proportion to cover 77 years, like the Spanish research, the total for Brits and Spaniards comes to exactly the same: 4,683.

So although 50% of Spaniards, compared with 40% of Brits, have arguments over missing items, it seems the amount of time they spend on trying to find them is equal – meaning, again, six-and-a-half months of a lifetime lost.

“About three-quarters of misplaced items were lost within the home,” says eSure.

Maybe, then, that annoying advice about 'checking down the back of the sofa' is more sound than we like to think.

And perhaps being disorganised is a human trait, nothing to do with culture, and if all respondents were honest in their surveys, Spaniards and UK nationals are every bit as messy as each other.