Albert Einstein at his desk on the Princeton University campus.


Is a Messier Desk Better?

By Kate Lorenz

"You've got multiple stacks of paper on your desk (not to mention the heaps slyly hidden under your desk), indiscriminate piles of books on your shelves and your cube walls are haplessly adorned with various items. OK, so you're messy. Can you really be productive amidst all that mess?

Yes, according to "A Perfect Mess," the book by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, which claims to reveal the hidden benefits of being unorganized and cluttered.

(...) A Method to the Madness

"Mess isn't necessarily the absence of order," Abrhamson and Freedman claim. "A messy desk can be a highly effective prioritizing and accessing system. In general, on a messy desk, the more important, urgent work tends to stay close by and near the top of the clutter, while the safely ignorable stuff tends to get buried to the bottom or near the back, which makes perfect sense. The various piles on a messy desk can represent a surprisingly sophisticated informal filing system that offer far more efficiency and flexibility than a filing cabinet could possibly provide."

The Surprise Benefits of Messiness

Attaining complete neatness and order may only be an illusion. Following rigid organizational systems and living life driven by a day planner means you're operating with blinders on. Many new discoveries, inventions and creative projects are the result of sheer happenstance or inadvertently veering off in an unexpected direction. If you don't inject a little disorder in your life you mostly likely will miss out on the serendipity of an unplanned success."

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