In the movie The Fifth Element, Bruce Willis lives in a tiny, cluttered mess of an apartment. The room is filled with junk except for one spot on the wall stenciled with the words: “KEEP CLEAR”.

For many people, their desk is like that apartment: stuff everywhere. It’s overwhelming and mentally draining to have a cluttered work area with so many things grabbing for your attention. Time management gurus chide messy desks (and with good reason) but some people, no matter how hard they try, will never have a clear desk. If you’re one of these people, don’t worry, you can still reduce your stress and reclaim space back by using that tip from The Fifth Element: declare a KEEP CLEAR zone.

Go get yourself some hazard warning tape and mark off a space about two feet by three feet on your desk, as shown below. If you have a cheap desk (like I do), go for the full effect and stencil KEEP CLEAR across it.

Now relax: allow yourself to have a cluttered workspace outside of the emergency taped area. There is such a thing as productive mess. But, the KEEP CLEAR zone is holy — it must be kept pristine. Within its borders, only work on one thing at a time.

Only the paper that you’re working on right now can go in the KEEP CLEAR box. If your working on the computer, then the keyboard and mouse can go inside the box. Everything else must stay out. The KEEP CLEAR zone not only gives you space to work, but it also focuses your attention.

As Randy Pausch said: it’s easier to get work done when it’s you vs. the one piece of paper instead of you vs. the whole desk of paper.

Why don’t you go out today and get some hazard warning tape and make your own, KEEP CLEAR zone.

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Header photograph from The 5th Element

Ever notice that the first ten hits on google are almost identical, no matter the search term? The first link is wikipedia and the remaining nine are commercial sites. Getting tired of that yet? I know I am.

The book The Perfect Mess suggests a different kind of search engine: Banana Slug. Banana Slug bills itself as the ‘long tail’ search engine. When you type in your search query, Banana Slug adds one random word before scanning its index. Type in ‘Wellington Grey’ and Banana Slug will actually search for ‘Wellington Grey +Foxtrot’. It’s amazing how well adding this bit of noise cuts through the usual search result cruft.

While I still use google for most things, Banana Slug has become an excellent backup and a great assistance when I just can’t quite find something on google.

[Click here to try Banana Slug]

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Header photograph by David Sifry

Everyone loves Moleskine notebooks. The rounded pages that don’t fray, the faux-leather cover and strap that let you feel secretly pretentious. A new moleskine smells like a fresh library. For office supply lovers, they are perfection.

Don’t use them.

If you keep a Moleskine to jot down notes and ideas, your pen will never touch paper. The pages, (especially the first page) are just too clean and perfect. Using such a fine, quality notebook makes you feel that only fine, quality ideas can fill it — not what you really need, like ‘buy milk’.

The lesson: Don’t use nice notebooks for ubiquitous capture.

Your pocket notebook should be a little, 50-cent junker that you can easily rip pages out of. Don’t keep it neat. To make ubiquitous capture work, you need as little resistance to writing down your thoughts as possible. Otherwise you will not capture them all. By keeping the notebook messy, but accessible, you take advantage of productive mess. Keeping it neat will make you hesitate scribbling a thought across an entire page as you walk to work.

The messiness makes it easy to record that half-baked thought or reminder. Just don’t forget to process your junk note book to zero during your weekly review.

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Header photograph by Paul Worthington

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

When starting with Getting Things Done, the weekly review is the most hassle and seems the least important. Why, if you are following such a perfect system, do you even need a weekly review?

The dark secret of the weekly review is that what you actually need is an imperfect system. Life isn’t perfect, life is messy. Many short-term projects work better with mess, e.g. in a perfect world, computer desktops would always look like this:

During the week, however, documents started or files downloaded get dumped onto the desktop, so that by the end of the week it’s covered with icons. It’s a mess. And that’s the way it should be.

The time spent organizing those files isn’t worth it — they have a small window of usefulness. Creating a folder somewhere for such ephemera is a waste of effort.

By dropping transient items in a prominent area like the desktop, they serve as reminders of the stuff you’re currently working on. The mess is a visible representation of temporary little projects and shows you when you have too much going on by growing too large.

However, if you don’t keep little messes in check, they will grow out of control. This is where the weekly review comes in. When it’s time for the weekly review, everything gets processed off the desktop. Everything. Each file is filed, deleted or sent. The desktop mess is kept on a tight leash — it exists only on the desktop and for no longer than seven days. This way the overall system is organized but can still take advantage of some of the benefits of mess.

This idea of limited mess applies to the overall GTD system. Don’t always be pristine with next actions and projects: keep odd scraps of papers and notes, leave files in a mess box. But, don’t let the messes grow and overwhelm you: reign them in during the weekly review.

While David Allen fundamentalists say this is heresy, even he says in The Book that there are times when the cost of running a perfectly smooth system is too great.

Allow some mess into your life, just keep it on a leash by reviewing it weekly.

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Header photograph by Ella’s Dad