A Clean Desk is a Sign of a Sick Mind

I must be insane then. I hate clutter. I think part of it comes from my parents. They kept lots of crap and it was everywhere. I tried very hard to keep a neat room. I used to move the furniture around in my room several times a year to get a fresh perspective and make new places to store things. I think it is partly why I became an archivist. Putting things in order soothes me.

So I came across this recent article in Time, "Messy is the New Neat." The article talks about a new book, A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder. One of the co-authors, Eric Abrahamson, spouts, "Moderately messy systems outperform extremely orderly systems." HA!

He further alleges that filing away loose papers can be counterproductive. They maintain that those with messy desks often stumble upon serendipitous connections between disparate documents. The authors offer the example of Nobel Prizewinning scientist Earl Sutherland discovered how hormones regulate cells among his desk-paper mess.

Abrahamson and David Freedman, the two authors do offer several suggestions to those (like me) obsessed with order:

• Make peace with your clutter. They maintain that "people are naturally a little clumsy and messy, and try as we might to cultivate monastery-like sanctuaries, clutter creeps back. Accept that, and you'll stress less." I have been told that I am "clumsy with a can-do attitude" but that doesn't stop me from keeping things orderly.
• Don't waste time organizing your laptop. I'll give them this one. In the day of powerful search engines as well as Google desktop, you'll find what you are looking for.
• Be sloppier with your schedule. I keep a calendar on my home computer, my work computer, and carry a datebook in my organizer. Plus a wall calendar and a desk blotter calendar in my office. Keepign them in sync is the issue. They might have something there. They advocate "a less structured date book makes it easier to adapt to inevitable surprises and affords you the freedom to go with the flow."
• Forget filing. They use the example of people who organize their CD collection alphabetically by artist . . . I wouldn't do that . . . OK, maybe I did. Get over it. But I suppose there are those out there who would remind me of original order. But I put the CDs in that order, so it is my original order. Accept that and we'll be fine. :)