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After posting my original article on creativity and messiness, I learned that I underestimated how many defenders of chronic mess piles are out there. They seem to think I’m claiming that unless your desk has only five objects on it, arranged symmetrically at all times, and your house is as empty as a politician’s promises, then it is impossible to get work done. Elaboration is coming.
By “mess,” I mean a state of physical disorder that is disruptive to human activity. A neat stack of magazines that happen not to be sorted chronologically is hardly a mess. An office with piles of magazines in random places high and low is a mess. A desk strewn with papers and tools and objects you’re working with is not a mess. A desk piled so high that it could be excavated and its contents dated using archeological methods, is a mess.
You might be surprised at how prevalent a problem this is and how vociferous its defenders are. There have been a number of recent books defending messes, and I mean the tornado-just-came-through-here type of messes. They make claims that messes have usefulness to certain kinds of thinkers, and even worse, that creativity and messiness are linked.
There are some cute stories of the innovation brought on by a mess. Repeated too often is the one about penicillin, which was discovered by accident in a messy laboratory. Were it not for the chaos in that place, they say, the right ingredients would not have come together by chance, and penicillin would have remained merely an annoying mold. Therefore, messes must be okay, especially when made at the hands of a genius.
Not mentioned is the fact that random chance is not a legitimate research strategy. Yes, lady luck brings the right ingredients together now and then. Yet it takes an active human intelligence to innovate. Or, for that matter, to properly identify and exploit the value of a one-in-a-million happening like penicillin or post-it note glue.
If messes promote creativity by juxtaposing random assortments of things, leading to potentially unforeseen connections among them, then wouldn’t every laboratory or office benefit from being thrown into total disarray right now? The occupants of those offices might make so many new connections while searching for past due invoices! For that matter, I should mix my rock collection with my stamp collection, and instead of storing it in a special place, distribute it throughout the house. My transportation coils could mingle with the silverware, and the snowflake obsidian just might turn up anywhere!
Joking aside, the claims that messes are in any way advantageous often insinuate that order is not. Order, we are told, is for boring, strait-laced types. It is stifling.
Is it stifling not to have a thousand distractions? I think of the white-collar employers you hear about now and then who experiment with shutting off their employees’ regular internet access. The employees always complain that they can’t check their horoscopes or email or the news or the weather, while the employer defends the move as an attempt to increase productivity. Then the employee advocates usually trot out some “workplace psychologist” who explains, using a lot of fancy words, that constant time-wasting online facilitates getting work done. I don’t buy it. A single second spent checking the news is a second spent not doing work. If the employees were honest, and explained that they were not so interested in the work and would prefer to fritter away part of their day, I would have more respect for them.
The one real downside to order is the effort it takes to establish and maintain it. That is why I suggest simply thinking intelligently about the issue. There are so many things one can do: not save so much stuff to begin with, do work in batches to save time, automate the work, or sit down and think hard about what truly is important enough for your time.
I stand by my conviction that orderliness in general, as opposed to chaos, is a human ideal. Chaos is a pattern of nature. A forest or a starry sky is just a jumble of parts. There is no organizing principle, because no intelligence was involved.
Since I worship human intelligence and all that it means, the sight of disarray in one’s physical belongings leaves me cold. I do not think, “How cozy” or “How artistic” or “He must be one of those geniuses.” I think, “What kind of man is satisfied with working or living in a pigsty?”
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