Originally Posted by
Slacker Mom
OK well here's a difference of Ni between two people. My dad is ENFj and my mother-in-law is ESFj.
When my dad travels, he goes through and figures out his route ahead of time, and figures what he will do along his trip, and has a pretty good idea of how long he'll need at each spot, so he's really confident when planning trips. My mom is ENTj, so she has creative Ni too, and they travel together generally as they're married and all, so they have an easy time on trips.
My mother-in-law (whom I adore btw) has this quirky habit of writing out this huge itinerary that goes into incredible detail including how much time we're likely to need for meals, potty breaks, etc. She really has to plan every moment. She has it down to when an airplane lands, and how far she has to go from one terminal to the other and when the other airplane leaves, and whether she'll need to use the bathroom (hates airplane toilets), and where those are located, and how long she's likely to need in there, and whether she'll need a meal, and what restaurants are going to be there, etc. Now, she is open to changing it (she values Ne after all) but then she still has to figure out just how long everything will take and so she keeps referring to her itinerary and checking to see where we've lost or gained time.
Another example is my daughter's teacher (also ESFj), who called me to find out what snack I was sending with my daughter to school, because she wanted to make sure she'd have enough time for what she wanted to do that day and needed to plan ahead of time how much time the snack would take. To me, that seems a bit silly, I mean the snack will take, what, 10 or 12 minutes depending on what it is. It isn't hard to adjust time a bit here and there to make up for a couple of extra minutes. But for someone with Ni PoLR, the uncertainty about how much time is needed can apparently be a bit stressful. Since learning how stressed she gets about this, I send things that are individually packaged so she doesn't have to worry about the extra time it would take otherwise.