[1] Today the trend is to declutter and simplify our lives. We talk to Tim Harford, who suggests that we should be messy instead.
Who is Tim Harford?
[2] Tim is an economist, journalist and broadcaster.
[3] He is the author of “Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy” and the million-selling “The Undercover Economist”.
Why are we talking to him?
[4] He is currently promoting his latest book, “Messy”, while writing another. One would assume he’s an impeccably organized person that is able to juggle this tangle of commitments with ease. He’s not – but, according to his latest book, that’s sort of the point.
[5] Tim argues that switching between tasks is a “messy” strategy that’s worked for many famous creatives. Focusing on one project might seem like the most efficient and simple way to organize one’s work. But when someone is stuck on an issue involved in one project, having another to focus on allows that person time for the brain to unstuck itself, contributing back to the original project.
Extract from the interview:
Tim, what does it mean to be messy?
[6] In the book, I talk about all kinds of different things in the context of mess: improvisation, distraction, multi-tasking, physical mess, ambiguity and imperfection. There are lots of different things that I’m discussing in the book, but I suppose what they have in common is they are arguing for the virtues of the stuff that doesn’t fit into the standard categories; the stuff that we can’t quantify; the stuff that we can’t organize or put into a neat box; the stuff that we can’t script. These things tend to make us feel anxious. We feel that we should have a script, that we should have a number, we should have a target, we should have a tidy desk. Of course, these things have their place, but there’s virtue in all the ambiguous, all the unquantifiable and all the imperfect stuff as well.
[7] I see “messy” as an argument against the excessive attempts to organize. If you think about your desk, what you find is if you spend a lot of effort trying to clear your desk or trying to tidy it, you will have vast archives of paperwork because you filed everything away. But you filed it so quickly that you don’t really understand your own filing system. So you have these other incredibly well-organized, metaphorically beautiful desks. You’re talking to that with someone who keeps piles of paper on their desk. You would think, “Well that’s a problem. That’s not very efficient.” It turns out this is highly efficient.
[8] Number one: Your pile of paper is self-organizing. The stuff that you keep using keeps arriving on the top of the pile. The stuff that you don’t touch sinks to the bottom of the pile. We think of it as being a random pile, but it’s not a random pile. It’s actually naturally and organically organized by the process of using it. The second advantage is you’ve got this desk with paper on it, so you’re surrounded by physical reminders of what you have to do, so you don’t need a carefully managed to-do list because you can’t in a very visible way the stuff you have to do. The third advantage is you have a very clear sense of what needs throwing away. It’s the stuff at the bottom of the pile.
[9] If you have this third situation where if you walked into someone’s office or you looked at someone’s desk, you would see that a person who appears to be disorganized because there’s paper everywhere actually has a much better organized system and they’re much more on top of their work. Whereas with the person who seems highly organized, actually everything looks neat but underneath the surface, the system is dysfunctional.
Is this true for everyone?
[10] Of course I’m talking about averages here, I’m generalizing. Everybody has their own system, and people come to all kinds of different systems work. If people have found a system that works for them, well that’s fine.
[11] In the book, I write about Benjamin Franklin, one of the most productive and successful people in history, incredibly messy and somewhat guilty about the fact that he was incredibly messy. He carried a lot of baggage around, literally, in terms of paper, but also psychologically. He felt bad that his desk was messy. Benjamin Franklin! If Benjamin Franklin has this guilty about not getting enough stuff done because he’s messy, I think the rest of us can cut ourselves some slack.
[12] Nevertheless, in offices we often find somebody in management has decided that there needs to be some kind of clean desk policy, for reasons that are often not very clear. Maybe it’s just aesthetic. They want the place to look like a magazine shoot. Or maybe they’ve read something about how operating theatres were so neat, how high-functioning precision engineering production lines work. And then in a very inappropriate way, they say, “Oh, and the same must be true for this regular office, which has just got paper and computers in it.” People are ordered to tidy their desks. Now, we’ve already discussed that actually a messy desk can be very effective, very functional.
[13] But there’s another problem on top of that, which is that people really hate being told what they can and can’t do with their own desks. It destroys their sense of their own space, of their control of their environment.
So, is there such a thing as a bad mess or a bad distraction, or do they always have merit?
[14] No, I think clearly there are many situations where messes are just entirely dysfunctional, and distractions just make it impossible to get stuff done. The argument in the book is not that mess is always good, distraction is always good, or there’s no situation that can’t be improved by adding a little chaos. I don’t believe that at all. What I do believe is that we found that our organizational systems can be so effective, and they make us feel so comfortable that we use them often situations where they work extremely well, and then we start trying to apply them in situations where they’re completely inappropriate.
[15] The argument of the book is just to try nudging the pendulum a little bit more toward mess. If we experiment a little bit more with improvisation, with ambiguity, with a bit of disruption and a new challenge, we might well be surprised by how that improves things.