Dh is an engineer.
When I am working, I spread things out all around me in stacks and piles and arrangements that look very random to him. If I go away I leave them in place so that I can come back and begin working again. This drives him nuts.
If he wants to use the space, or the space is bothering him, he gathers all my papers up in a neat pile and puts it somewhere. For years I have tried to explain to him that he has destroyed my “filing system” and caused me tons more work and frustration by doing that. I tell him that if he will just ask me, I will move everything to a different space, it will take a few more minutes, but it will save me hours. He doesn’t get it.
Today, he started to move some things off the couch, and I said “STOP. Let me do that. It matters where you put them. The act of moving them matters.” Then I had a brainstorm - “think of this as a giant circuit board. When I look at a circuit board, it just looks like a collection of random little pieces and designs on a surface to me, but if I started pulling all the pieces off and wiping away the lines to clean the surface, I would destroy the circuit board, and even if all the pieces were collected neatly in a bag, they would no longer be functional and all the work would be undone and the person who built the circuit board would have to start over before he could use it for what it was for, right? My ‘mess’ is like my circuit board that records information and allows me to work on a problem.” And he said “oh.”