A perfect mess

"If you don't tidy your room now, I'll do it for you", my mother used to threaten. Reason enough to take action, because if my mother cleaned my room I would never be able to find things back. Or worse, she would throw away something important! It didn't really work, I'm still not good in keeping my place neat; on my desk (actually, in more places in our house) you'll find hugh piles of papers. Most "pilers" say they easily find back what they need, but I have to admit that this is not always my experience. Sometimes I print a report, of which I later find a copy in one of the piles on my desk.

Oh, I did try: arrange, archive, index documents and carefully plan activities. Though, in the end I always return to my old, disorganised habits. That is why I was happy to read the book "A perfect mess" by David H. Freedman (Or, in Dutch: "De wet van de stimulerende wanorde"). We are always taught that being neat and organised is best, however the authors contradict this statement - they argue that arranging takes time. Time we don't win back when we say we find back documents more easily. Reading this, I proudly looked at the mess on my desk.

One thing the authors don't mention is that technology helps people like me being disorganised. Computer disk space is cheap nowadays, so why should I bother throwing away files? I used to clean up the disk when it was nearly full. Now I buy more gigabites and the problem is solved. As well as storing files and e-mail messages in folders - not necessary any longer. Google Desktop will find them for me.

I only have one request: can the Google people invent something that helps me finding things back in my house? Till that time, I'm afraid I will have do some tidying. Not too often of course, because that's a real waste of time.

Comments

[Arjun Thomas]

Another interesting article! Thanks for the post.

Cheers,
Arjun.