Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips and Personal Productivity Tools

Too much organization has its disadvantages. That is the thesis of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder by Eric Abrahamson and David H Freedman. In their book the authors go through examples where over-organization is detrimental and mess should be allowed to grow.

Take, for example, governor Schwarzenegger of California. According to the book, it’s impossible to schedule an appointment with the governor — not because he’s such a busy man, but because he doesn’t keep a calendar. If you want to see him, you can call right now. If he’s free then come on over, if he’s not free, call back later. While this must be frustrating for people trying to reach the governor, it allows him the freedom to immediately deal with whatever messy problems arise. If disaster strikes, Schwarzenegger doesn’t have six hours of perfectly planned meetings blocking the day, he is clear to get the problem solved.

As another example, the authors discuss the ideal American suburban lawn. They detail the enormous amounts of time, energy, and money that go into maintaining perfectly weed-free square of grass. Aside from the effort involved, communities that mandate orderly lawns reap ecological disaster on water-strained areas, such as the American Mid-West. The trouble of a traditional lawn can be avoided, but only if the home owners are able to embrace some mess and develop a more natural looking lawn that blends with the environment.

The book is, perhaps inevitably, a mess itself. Unfortunately, this is not in the good way the authors champion. Sections are written in inconsistent ways and with different styles: evidence of the problems intrinsic to dual authorship. Many of the chapter subtopics are only a paragraph or two long and read like they are place holders intended to be filled out in more detail later, but never were.

Also, there are the lists. For a book on messiness, it has weirdly obsessive lists of things. Lists that numb the mind with their completeness. You’ll be reading a chapter when, suddenly a multi-page long list of ‘The Ways People Can Be Messy’ appears. This includes, but is not limited to: appropriately messy, cosmetically neat messy, weak-link messy, sloppily versus structurally messy, transiently messy, provocatively messy, contextually messy, constitutionally messy, existentially messy and genetically messy.

Still, The Perfect Mess is highly worth reading, especially if you are on the more obsessive-compulsive side of the organizational world. I’ve taken a few of the book’s principals to heart and have allowed some limited, productive mess into my life.

[click here to buy A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder]

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Header photograph by thesullys