Customer Reviews

A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder--How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place

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Over the last several years, I've worked very hard to become more and more organized with my stuff. I used to have a very difficult time finding things that I needed when I needed them and I also had some degree of difficulty effectively managing my time. Thankfully, over the last few years, I've really managed to conquer both of these. I feel incredibly productive on an average day now and I rarely have trouble finding the things that I need.

Yet with all this organization, I find that there are simply some things where organization gets in the way. The best example I can think of is brainstorming. When I go to the library, I find lots of books and articles worth reading. I often photocopy interesting passages there. At home, I often jot down notes from things that I observe as well as tearing articles out of magazines as I read them.

This ends up being something of a pile of ideas. And what I've found is that this pile of ideas is much more effective if it's chaotic. If I try to order it, I get fewer ideas out of that pile. On the other hand, if I just let it be, tossing new stuff on there in a haphazard fashion, it starts to click. Then I just set aside some time each week for brainstorming, where I grab articles from that pile at random, read what I've highlighted, flip through personal finance books, and so on. This chaos generates ideas - things that would not have normally associated themselves together sometimes become linked because of this mess.

Frankly, sometimes it's better to have disorder. And that's the idea behind A Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman. They argue that there is often a significant benefit in productivity, creativity, resilience, and profit in allowing a certain level of messiness and they offer a ton of advice in finding that balance.

1. The Cost of Neatness
Abrahamson and Freedman open the book by arguing that there is a significant cost to neatness, one that is often not repaid by the benefits of neatness. One particular example they use is that of an ordered pack of playing cards, used in essence to represent a filing system. If you need to retrieve four specific cards from a pack of playing cards, it will be much easier to find them from a pack that's organized by suit and rank than from a pack that's in random order. However, there's a very large up front cost in actually organizing the cards into order. Plus, there's also a time cost in refiling - when you have to return the four cards, you have to put them back in the right place in the ordered deck, whereas with the unordered deck, you can throw them in wherever (or perhaps right at the front, because you're likely to need certain files more often than others). They argue that the time cost of the initial filing plus the time cost of refiling doesn't add up to equal the net benefit of being able to pull out a particular card a bit more quickly.

2. A Mess Sampler
Here, several areas of messiness are surveyed: desks, lawns, corporate planning, and noisy phone calls are discussed in detail. They conclude from these surveys that there is an inherent cultural bias towards neatness, but that this cultural bias might not be beneficial at all in many situations. I particularly liked the argument about lawns - it struck a note with my green sensibilities. Imagine a suburban neighborhood where everyone keeps their lawn immaculate with regular mowing, fertilizers, and seeding that damages the soil over the long term but keeps a gorgeous lawn in the short term. Then, imagine one house that's "green" and would rather that their lawn become natural prairie than the well-fertilized beasts around them. Guess who's considered the outcast?

3. The History of Mess
Something of a history of organization follows, covering in detail many historical movements. In particular, Frederick Winslow Taylor is discussed - he was a business analyst in the late 19th and early 20th century who wrote the very influential book Principles of Scientific Management, which argued strongly on behalf of time organization and regimentation within the workplace. In short, they seem to conclude that the pro-organization and anti-mess philosophy of today largely comes from principles that work in narrow situations that came to be applied and accepted in a far broader sense than they were originally intended.

4. The Benefits of Mess
Abrahamson and Freedman offer tons of examples of how messiness is actually beneficial in various methods of life, piling together a ton of anecdotes that make a lot of sense. One example that particularly stood out to me was that of Harvey's, a small-town hardware store that basically just crams stuff on the shelves and effectively relies on personal observations of customers and employees to know when to restock. The whole store comes off as chaotic and unorganized, but because of the arrangement, they save money on organization (there's no real need for more organized stocking) and on sales per square feet (because there's so much jammed in there, customers walk by more items on their way to and from their intended purchase, increasing impulse buying opportunities).

5. Messy People
The authors address the idea that people are messy in very different ways, some healthy and some not so healthy. The crux of their argument here seems to be that there's a happy medium point that's effective - one can easily be too messy, while people can also become completely obsessed with organization. Most of the examples show this conflict - people tend to be successful with some degree of disorganization in their life, but are distracted by too much messiness or too much obsession with neatness.

6. Messy Homes
My mother was a firm believer in the idea of "dirty floors and happy kids," meaning that it was more important to build a strong relationship with your children than it was to keep a perfectly clean house. I tend to believe in the same thing - you're better off playing out in the yard with your children than scrubbing in the corner with a toothbrush. The authors go even further here, suggesting that most disorganization in the home is merely a sign of being lived in - why have a spotless garage if your kids don't have a place to put their baseball gloves?

7. Mess and Organizations
If the last several years have taught us anything in the technology sector, it's that large, traditional, top-down organizations don't innovate nearly as well as seemingly chaotic little startups. Why is that? In smaller organizations, there's more opportunity for people to interact from different parts of the organization - the CEO might have an office next door to most of the coding team and they interact several times daily. That type of interaction - and thus "messiness" of ideas - doesn't happen in larger organizations. Again, there are some limits to this - this works well for a team of 20, but chaos in a team of 20,000 can be a huge problem.

8. Messy Leadership
The primary point of this chapter is that there is no standard pattern of leadership, nor is there any standard pattern for messiness. People lead effectively in different ways, and they show this through profiles of different leaders, from the strong questioning and anti-authoritarian leadership of Bert Rutan to the highly structured leadership of Steve Jobs at Apple. My take from this is that generic guides for how to be a leader don't really work - there are lots of leadership styles and there's no recipe to blindly follow to success.

9. The Politics of Mess
Our laws are a perfect example of the mix of order and chaos. Laws are often haphazard and seemingly contradictory, plus they're being edited and rewritten all the time. Yet, out of the chaos of laws comes the order of society, where we have a ton of freedom and individual autonomy while so many of our needs (like roads, laws that protect our property and safety, etc.) are just simply met. Great success and order from chaos, indeed.

10. Optimizing Mess
A big theme of this book has been that a certain level of mess is good, but how do you deal with things if there's too much mess - or not enough mess? The rule of thumb here seems to be to try new things, usually an increment at a time. My favorite example of this was "no luck poker," which sought to greatly reduce the randomness in the amount of luck in poker. This would make poker less "messy" and more organized - and, obviously, it flopped. Why? Poker (at least in the no limit hold `em variety) has a very nice balance of order and messiness, and disrupting that makes for a less compelling game.

11. Messy Thinking
I quite liked this chapter, as it summed up quite well why my method of having a pile of random ideas and notes seems to work so well for my writing. In a nutshell, messiness helps in situations where making connections that aren't observed by others is valuable. Brainstorming is the perfect example of this - when you're just pitching thoughts, messiness is a very good thing. On the other hand, when you're fleshing out an idea, less messiness is good - you need a framework, not a bunch of ideas flopping around in the muck.

12. Pathological Mess
Excessive messiness (or excessive neatness) is often the sign of a psychological problem. For example, excessive hoarders (people who keep so much stuff that they have to wall off pieces of their homes, for instance) are exhibiting symptoms of pathological messiness, as are people who have a hard time concentrating on specific tasks for more than a moment or two. If messiness causes deep obstructions in your day to day life, seek some help. Some messiness is good - too much is a real problem.

13. The Aesthetics of Mess
Abrahamson and Freedman close the book with the astute point that messiness and disorganization plays a key role in art, both high art and popular art. Pulp Fiction, for example, is successful because of the messiness of the ordering of scenes; Donnie Darko is another example of how disorder in the plot makes the entire thing more compelling. The idea of a strict beginning, strict middle, and strict end of an organized book, film, show, or anything often limits what can be told - tossing out that structure and making it messy also makes things interesting.

*Some Thoughts on A Perfect Mess*
Here are three things I think I think about A Perfect Mess.

It's really all about optimization. Organization is only useful if it winds up being a net gain after you subtract the invested time. That's why most overarching organization schemes tend to fail - there's too much work involved in maintaining the system.

This is also why GTD works for me. There's almost no overhead for GTD, at least the way I do it. My method is a nice mix of messiness and order - I just jot down thoughts in my notebook as they come to mind and deal with that little mess later on. Instead of trying to keep stuff ordered, I find it more important to just get the ideas down and deal with that little mess later.

This book was long on ideas, but light on specific actionable points. Mostly, it just seems to be a very effective and thought-provoking argument against over-organization. It doesn't offer specifics on finding that balance for yourself, other than to try new things incrementally instead of diving in to a huge, overarching organization plan.

*Is A Perfect Mess Worth Reading?*
A Perfect Mess is loaded with a lot of compelling thinking about the balance between organization and messiness and often concludes that messiness (to an extent) is a very good thing.

If this seems like a no-brainer to you, this book probably won't light your fire. On the other hand, if you find yourself disagreeing with or intrigued by the premise, particularly if you have challenges with organization in your own life, A Perfect Mess is an enjoyable and thought-provoking read.

My only real complaint is that it doesn't offer much specific direction on how to find the right messiness balance in your own life. You have to dig that out from in between the lines. It might have been powerful to have a final chapter that drags those points and principles out into the open.

Even given that, A Perfect Mess was a worthwhile, compelling read. Check it out.

The book starts out, and is touted, as something that will convince us that being disorderly will make the world a better place. In the end, the book does not do this, instead it provides a much more balanced perspective than it initially eludes to.

From my personal experience, operating in a mess is great in the creative stages of something (i.e. when doing design work). Coming up with new things, ideas, elements that do not currently exist in the world, requires a lot of input - a lot of outside influence from various sources so that something "new" and unique can be synthesized. It's almost impossible to know where the inspiration for this creation will come from, so just tossing everything into the soup works very well, then you add it to the flavor you're stewing. You ladle out the chunks that don't work when you start paring down that soup.

As your idea formulates, you pare it down to something you can build. As you get to finishing touches you are seeking less and less input - whatever you are designing is taking shape and by definition that limits the options you have at your disposal. As you approach the finished product, your work is clean, clear, well defined. It is very organized, less messy.

If you are limited and operate in only one aspect of this spectrum (i.e. design), then you can possibly always operate in mess. If you are widely adept, and operate in the entire spectrum (from design, to creation, to implementation, and maintenance) you know that certain levels of mess benefit different points along that spectrum.

The secret to maximizing your potential is knowing where you are along that spectrum and making use of the appropriate mode of operating in it. I would be willing to bet, however, that many may seek this volume merely as a way to justify an "existence"...and I don't think that it's just that simple. Existing constantly in mess does not ALWAYS contribute to greater insights, quality, existence, and certainly doesn't contribute to greater clarity.

This work does a good job of convincing us of the value of mess. However, it stretches into realms (particularly toward the end) that divert from the point; taking us off on tangents that do not contribute to the central thesis. Yeah, not all results come from perfect order and not all come from perfect messes. The authors acknowledge the limitations of each, if you read it without an agenda you'll get a balanced perspective from the overall volume.

If you already understand that spending too much time being organized can limit creativity (and reduce availability of/openness to ideas) then this book is not for you. If you feel that nothing should be organized, then the book could serve you well. If you feel that everything must be in it's place and there is no room in your life for disorganization (even temporarily) then the book is definitely for you.

In the end the book does not convince us to be entirely disorganized; it teaches more about what functional disorganization is like. (The same principles will hold for organization - it can be both functional and dysfunctional.) Either approach is functional when it serves us, they become dysfunctional when operating (living) in that system takes more effort than not operating in it would.

In the words of the authors:

"The advantages and disadvantages to increasing mess don't kick in smoothly and steadily. With most systems, adding a little mess tends to lead quickly to some big advantages with few drawbacks. As the mess grows, the rate at which the advantages grow tends to slow and eventually trail off - a desk that's already pretty messy doesn't become a lot more useful when you add a bit more mess to it. Meanwhile, the rate at which the disadvantages accumulate will eventually start to take off - a very messy desk with just a small amount of open workspace can dramatically leap into utter uselessness when a little additional mess takes over that space. The result is that as mess is added to a system, the disadvantages will at some point start to overwhelm the advantages."

I purchased the hardcover of this book for the title alone. I live in a perfect mess. But the inside of the book was just as good as the cover, because it gave proof to my theory that I'm not messy, I'm "alternatively organized" (a term I coined here for the first time and stake full ownership of). Nonetheless, when I got to the last chapter, notes on pathological mess, I did an abrupt u-turn.

Although written in an academic tone, this book is a great read for those of us who have lived under the guilt associated with messiness. I took it to work and and quoted from it, particularly the parts about flexibility and creativity, to my boss and to my fellow teachers. A very gratifying experience, indeed.

You can understand more about why this book is so special to me by reading the book:

Lucy Adams, author of If Mama Don't Laugh, It Ain't Funny

I can't believe that my messiness has finally become a positive trait. I love it¡¡¡¡¡

Who says that to be perfectly organized is the way to greater success?

Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman contend otherwise in A PERFECT
MESS, an engrossing book that I recently got a kick out of listening to
on CD . . . it got me rethinking the concept that an orderly existence
is the only way to go . . . rather, the authors contend that a little disorder
can actually be good for us.

Through the use of examples from business, parenting, cooking, the world
of terrorism and even the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, you begin
to see that messy systems often use resources more efficiently and
yield better results.

I was hooked from the beginning when I heard about this one speaker
at a conference of the National Association of Professional
Organizers . . . he actually told members not to confirm appointments
because doing so gives them the opportunity to cancel others . . . you
should instead just show up . . . that's not necessarily the "cleanest"
way to handle things, but it is often the best way to do so.

Among the other tidbits that caught my attention were the following:

* A jazz group can improvise and go into different areas, whereas a
symphony orchestra can't.

* Good boxers move randomly around their opponents.

* The best way to see a city is to wander around rather than to see
tourist spots.

* The authors' rule for organization: ACE . . . Awwwwww, relax; Carve out
some time; and Eject some stuff.

* A 50 cent magnet can be your most valuable organizing tool. Use it to put
up pictures, soccer schedules, etc. on your refrigerator.

And my favorite:

* Some would say that making your bed in the morning is like tying your shoe
after you've taken it off.

Do yourself a favor and get a copy of A PERFECT MESS . . . then, if you can
find where you put it, read it for many useful ideas.

Breaks mess into several categories and uses scientific studies, examples from successful businesses, and anecdotal stories to illustrate the benefits of some disorder at work and home.

Mess provides numerous advantages, including: 1. Things are close at hand, 2. no rigid plan means flexibility, and 3. serendipitous usefulness is created when you stumble upon one thing while looking for another in all the mess. The value of organization is questioned and some balance of both is recommended in the end.

I found the description of the Japanese filing system interesting and useful.

I found this book at a used book store, filed away in the business section, and I picked it up entirely at random. The description on the cover was enough for me to open it up, and what I found inside was compelling enough for me to buy it. This could easily have been a terrible book; it's not.

It's not a strategic business book; it's not a how-to guide for how to use disorder or clutter to make your business or life more efficient. But the best non-fiction books make you see the world in an entirely new light, much in the way Malcolm Gladwell's books can. The stories in this book range far and wide, from the care of grass lawns to poker chips, and involving many different walks of life. After you read it, you'll start to see them everywhere.

At the time I'm writing this, this book is a bargain book listed at $5. I paid twice that for a used copy, and I still think it was worth it.

_A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder_ provides vindication for those of us who never seem to attain the level of orderliness we feel our lives "should" contain.

Authors Eric Abrahamson (professor of management at Columbia Business School) and David H. Freedman (a contributing editor and the technology columnist at _Inc._ magazine) label a system "messy" "if its elements are scattered, mixed up, or varied due to some measure of randomness, or if for all practical purposes it appears random from someone's point of view." Thus, what may be orderly to one person may appear messy to another -- if, for example, the system of order cannot be discerned. While "messiness" may be due to an absence of order, it is more often due to a system of order that isn't working properly.

"Messy" can describe not only living quarters and workspaces, but also lawns, schedules, traffic patterns, company policies and procedures, leadership styles, thought processes, and a host of other things. The authors contrast "messiness" and "neatness" in these various contexts, and they describe individuals, businesses, and organizations that have achieved phenomenal success despite -- or, more accurately, because of -- their unconventional organizational structures.

While Abrahamson and Freedman concede that messiness is not always superior to neatness, they point out the benefits of messiness because of our society's general bias toward neatness. They demonstrate how moderate disorganization often leads to greater flexibility, efficiency, and effectiveness than do more highly organized systems. In addition, the unusual juxtapositions that may occur in a messy environment can spark creativity or suggest solutions to problems.

_A Perfect Mess_ may inspire us to reconsider the optimal level of neatness or messiness in various areas of our lives. Doing so may free up hours of our time, unleash our creativity, and allay our guilt.

Some years ago I discovered that almost half of world population was not as organized as I thought they might be, I discovered I was normal!!! and without any guilt.
This book reframes mess into new perspective. Some chapters called my attention, Ch 1 - The Cost of Neatness; Ch 3 - Types of Mess; Ch 4 - The benefits of mess and Ch 12 - Pathological Mess.
I am a firm believer that some mess is normal and sometimes necessary to enhance creativeness and you may read this book and Time Management for Unmanageable People and, for sure you will reframe your thoughts: "Mess is Often in the Eyes of the BEHOLDER"
Humberto Souza - Brazil

I applaud the authors/editors/publishers' promotion tactics of packaging this book as a serious and scholarly work. I dislike its heavy appeal to equivocation (a logical fallacy) upon the term mess, the absence of statistical support for their claim (the same fault of those professional organizers), and the manipulative bias of buzz/form (the title) over substance (plenty of individual stories do not make it a good theory), despite a subtle shift to the discussion of the achievement of "modest" or "optimal" level of messiness in the latter part of the book. If you want to read a book of a variety of stories or to rid some sense of guilt, it's okay. If your objective is to take advantage of your various degree of "messiness", please give this a pass.

p.s. This book reminds me of why many people despise those scholars who regard management as social science. BTW, the only point I like about this book may be the quote in the opening of Chapter 1, "If a cluttered desk is a sign ofa cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk? - Albert Einsten". What a great but misleading consolation to the target readers!