Saying Yes to Mess

My Dad showed me this article today and I thought it very interesting and apropos to my family and my personal life. I grew up in a cluttered home, which I never minded at all. The clutter shows that the home is lived in and is not merely a structure of a house. The clutter gives the place character, and makes it uniquely our own. I have inherited my cluttered traits from my parents (as have my two younger brothers). I now live in a cluttered apartment, with a cluttered bedroom, and a cluttered desk. Albert Einstein said “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk?” I think that is very true. I prefer to spend my free time doing more productive and fun things, rather than going through clutter. I also saw a refridgerator magnet (on my grandmother's fridge) that said "Dull people have immaculate homes". I guess that's true to an extent. I suppose some of those people don't have anything better to do, so they spend each day cleaning their house. I've know a number of parents (of friends, and friends of my brothers) who are like that. I've also know other parents (of friends and friends of my brothers) who are of the cluttered mindset. On average, the cluttered home and parents are the more fun to be at and around.

Other quotes from the article that I particularly enjoyed are:

"Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat “office landscapes”) and that messy closet owners are probably better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts. It’s a movement that confirms what you have known, deep down, all along: really neat people are not avatars of the good life; they are humorless and inflexible prigs, and have way too much time on their hands."

"Total organization is a futile attempt to deny and control the unpredictability of life."

"As a corollary, the book’s authors examine the high cost of neatness — measured in shame, mostly, and family fights, as well as wasted dollars — and generally have a fine time tipping over orthodoxies and poking fun at clutter busters and their ilk, and at the self-help tips they live or die by. They wonder: Why is it better to pack more activities into one day? By whose standards are procrastinators less effective than their well-scheduled peers? Why should children have to do chores to earn back their possessions if they leave them on the floor, as many professional organizers suggest?"

"Mess is robust and adaptable, like Mr. Schwarzenegger’s open calendar, as opposed to brittle, like a parent’s rigid schedule that doesn’t allow for a small child’s wool-gathering or balkiness. Mess is complete, in that it embraces all sorts of random elements. Mess tells a story: you can learn a lot about people from their detritus, whereas neat — well, neat is a closed book. Neat has no narrative and no personality (as any cover of Real Simple magazine will demonstrate). Mess is also natural, as Mr. Freedman and Mr. Abrahamson point out, and a real time-saver. “It takes extra effort to neaten up a system,” they write. “Things don’t generally neaten themselves.”"

"Indeed, the most valuable dividend of living with mess may be time."

"In the semiotics of mess, desks may be the richest texts. Messy-desk research borrows from cognitive ergonomics, a field of study dealing with how a work environment supports productivity. Consider that desks, our work landscapes, are stand-ins for our brains, and so the piles we array on them are “cognitive artifacts,” or data cues, of our thoughts as we work.
To a professional organizer brandishing colored files and stackable trays, cluttered horizontal surfaces are a horror; to cognitive psychologists like Jay Brand, who works in the Ideation Group of Haworth Inc., the huge office furniture company, their peaks and valleys glow with intellectual intent and showcase a mind whirring away: sorting, linking, producing. (By extension, a clean desk can be seen as a dormant area, an indication that no thought or work is being undertaken.). His studies and others, like a survey conducted last year by Ajilon Professional Staffing, in Saddle Brook, N.J., which linked messy desks to higher salaries (and neat ones to salaries under $35,000), answer Einstein’s oft-quoted remark, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk?”"

Anyway, here is the link to the article:

"Saying Yes to Mess" by Penelope Green
Appeared in the New York Times on December 21, 2006.