Toward an Efficient Level of Disorder

A couple of months ago, The Economist had a brief review of a book called A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder--How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place (how is that for a crazy-ass long title? Many dissertations don’t manage to cram that many words into their titles) which is, unfortunately, available to subscribers only. The review at Amazon covers much of the same ground and comes to a similar conclusion: there’s some interesting stuff here, but it’s too bad that the book itself is so disorganized and repetitive. (Heh.)

Some of the evidence in the book that The Economist points to seems really stretching it to me (“Hearing depends on random movement of molecules: when they coincide with sounds from outside, they are strong enough to stimulate the inner ear.” – so I won’t be able to hear things well enough if I don’t have piles of junk in my environment?), but the general ideas that not all chaos is bad, that organization and planning have real costs to weigh against their potential benefits, and that different situations/systems have differing optimal levels of organization/planning make sense to me. (We probably all know people that use extended planning and organization processes and tasks as a way to procrastinate about actually doing the work without appearing, to themselves or others, to be lazy, scared, or overwhelmed, or who simply are being extremely inefficient by using a single approach, that is helpful in some cases, globally and without consideration.) But to what degree are the authors arguing against a straw man? How many cleanliness, organization, and planning gurus/advocates actually make the case that every single thing should be as orderly as is humanly possible? I think most everyone would agree that the trick is finding the appropriate level of order for the situation; it’s just a matter of people disagreeing on what that right level is. I believe that one reason people can’t agree on the right level is because that level differs not only across situations and environments, but also, to some extent, across individuals. (Yes, I realize this is not some hugely original insight.) The fact that some people need their environments to be more orderly in order to function well could be a result of buying in to some cultural idea that messy places represent messy minds, but could also easily reflect something genuine about their own preferences and mental requirements. I’m not arguing that some kind of “revealed optimization” shows itself in the choices every person makes, but merely observing that this personal variable complicates the analysis.

All this being said, I am certain that many people who live their lives with a distinctly inefficient level of disorder will be happy to latch on to the idea that “mess is good” and use the book to defend themselves against those who would suggest that leaving 3 week old Domino’s pizza boxes on the floor of the living room is gross and unacceptable and of zero benefit, while missing any more subtle messages. I am anticipating a bit of misguided, self-righteous triumphalism from some of the people with “Bless This Mess” cross-stitches or “Planning: Much work remains to be done before we can announce our total failure to make any progress” demotivational posters on the wall.

I am sufficiently interested, though, that I might read the book myself. I am greatly curious to what degree they ground their thesis in actual research and how much is anecdotal evidence; I am not greatly inspired by the references to specifics like Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t plan his day, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin because he didn’t clean his lab very well, and the Marine Corps doesn’t make detailed advanced plans. I can hope that the authors simply recognized that a general audience non-fiction book needs to have prominent examples to be a bestseller and used these anecdotes to illustrate broader theoretical, preferably research-based points.