A Perfect Mess is a great book, and a counterpoint to the covey-esqe organization books and philosophy that I also love. Turns out there's a "perfect mess" where disorder and order balance off to the peak efficiency possible.
For example, I use what I call a surface organizational system. My computer desktop is clean. My desk is clean. All papers and documents are tucked away -- but in one spot where I can find it all. For paper, it all goes into a basket. When the basket gets full, I dump it all in the trash unless I need it. For my computer, everything goes in one folder, where "find" can find what I need. That's it.
There's also a good blog article on the book where the following is noted:
Messiness in Western society is associated with a lot of negative things. Clutter, disorder, messiness is associated with dirt, disease, and filth. Messiness is considered inhuman, uncivilized — remember Mom telling you your room was a “pig sty”?
It’s also associated with laziness, the greatest of sins in a Western mindset guided by the Protestant work ethic. While we might feel that our work takes priority over cleaning up, there’s a part of us that will always feel that we should be doing it all — that not cleaning up is a sign of sloth, no matter how much other work we’re getting done in the meantime.
Messiness is also a class issue. Middle-class reformers have always advocated lives of zen-like simplicity to their working-class charges. (In the 1910’s and ’20s, they would set up model homes in poor tenements showing workers and immigrants how a “proper” home should be kept — plain furniture, no curtains, open cupboards, hardwood floors, and bare walls were the norm, in contrast to the mish-mash of overstuffed furniture, cheap posters and wall calendars, heavy curtains, and multiple rugs the immigrants and workers preferred.) Wealthy people look down on the nouveau riche who stuff their homes with Baroque furniture, Persian rugs, and glod-trimmed everything. Non-clutter is the foundation of Apple’s success — among well-off, professional, upper-middle-class social elites (and their emulators).
But there’s a cost for this kind of neatness, a point of diminishing returns beyond which more time spent organizing and cleaning means less time spent getting work done. This is especially true when workers (and I’m including the work of family, home life, and hobbies here as well as the work we do for our jobs) “borrow” systems that are advocated by professionals as “gospel” but do not truly reflect the individual’s working life or personality. As it happens, a great many highly organized people are no more able — and even less able — to find the things they need, when they need them, than the chronically messy.
Key points:
- Organization is expensive. Use it sparingly.
- Allow for randomness to creep into your environment. It allows for the unexpected to happen.
- Messiness in some situations -- like brainstorming -- is extremely useful.
- Let organizational structures self-assemble if possible. For example, with a stack of paper, the most used page will always tend to drift to the top because it's most used. Many things in life are like that.
http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Mess-Disorder-How-Cluttered-Fly/dp/0316114758/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204835594&sr=8-2
