Slashdot Mirror
Slobs Found To Be More Productive Than Neatniks
writertype writes "Are you a slob? Do you pile papers on top of folders on top of game boxes? Here's the thing that those anal neat people can't even conceive of: you're more productive than they are. That's the conclusion of "A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder," by Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman, a new book that argues neatness is overrated, costs money, wastes time and quashes creativity."
In other news: People with Anorexia found to be more productive than normal eaters.
"It's quite ingenious!" exclaimed one researcher, "it seems that because Anorexics do not need to take time to eat, they are far more productive!"
When asked whether health implications or possible mortality ensuing from Anorexia could negatively affect productivity, the researcher seemed angered, and left the interview.
On a serious note. One can get a lot done when they don't have to deal with cleaning shit up. But there is a certain point at which the stench, impossibility of finding important items, and spousal/co-worker nagging will counter any increased productivity.
"She says she hasn't recovered since an incident when members of her family tried to clean up her mess."
Okay, I'm the organized one in our household, but if anyone tried to clean up after me (i.e., put stuff where I can't find it) I'd be just as unproductive as they are.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
The article is about clutter not hygiene.
My guess -- this article was written by a slob.
Which is the perfect excuse to ask for a raise!
;-)
"But, boss, you really have to admit that MY desk is much more messier than everyone else in this company! I demand more money! See here? We are talking about a freaking 3 DAYS OLD PIZZA, buried under papers and backup tapes for chrissake!!"
I hasten to say that I already got a raise. I am just rehearsing for the end of the year review...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Clean desk
I'm just to busy being productive and I can't remember which stack of papers my keyboard is under.
What do we do with the 8 hours of the day we would have otherwise spent scrubbing the bathtub with a toothbrushZ
The original generic sig.
law of diminishing returns. and after that it might even hurt productivity. what's new? oh, and don't even try to achieve perfect messiness. just do whatever seems to be getting work done. if you are being underproductive try some new ideas and that might hurt a little but don't stick with them they keep hurting for long.
As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. In my experience, being a bit messy can improve productivity by shunting unimportant tasks away from your center of attention. For example, if I receive a bunch of fluff memos, they're going in the kill-file pile until I get around to reading them in detail. (Which may never happen.) But I haven't disposed of them yet, so I can still retrieve them if necessary.
:-P
The problem is that if you let the mess grow too large, it *WILL* impact your ability to operate efficiently. So every once in a while you need to do a house cleaning of your different paper stacks, your email, your desktop files, and whatever other info you use on a regular basis.
Which gets me to another point. It's not that the "slobs" aren't organized. In fact, they may have a very good organization system. It's just that they allow the system to be strained to the breaking point before reorganizing. For example, I might start with an email folder called "work". That's going to grow too large in short order. But when it does grow too large, then it becomes clear whether it makes more sense to reorganize around department or by project. So I organize around the most effective order until that order also breaks down.
My point is that order is a good thing. It merely comes in many forms.
On another note, I absolutely love the way GMail handles my email. Rather than moving things to different folders automatically (where I'll never even realize that new messages have arrived), its tagging and filtering system allows me to auto-tag emails from mailing lists, board members, fellow project workers, etc. So I can view it in my inbox, then archive it without having to worry that I'll never find it again. The result is that my GMail account has kept more organized than any other email account that I've ever used. Now if only I could get a time machine to obtain time to respond to the lower-priority stuff.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Slobs are more productive when there's only one person (the slob) working on something, when you start having more than one person working on a job then you'll probably find the tidy people start overtaking the slobs quite quickly.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
FTFA: "When you're disorganized, it's an expense you have no control over, the cost in lost productivity," Izsak said. "You're losing money if you're not organized."
As a veteran "messy" person I see the deep flaw in quotes about productivity losses due to disorganization. Neatness does not imply productive ease of access and mess does not imply disorganization. I know where things are on my mess of a desk. And every single time I waste time "organizing" it, I then waste time trying to find stuff.
For me, and for other messy-deskers, neatness is the antithetical to productivity.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
time being spent on the upkeep of said neatness:
"People who are really, really neat, between what it takes to be really neat at the office and at home, typically will spend anywhere from an hour to four hours a day just organizing and neatening," he said.
Why not automate your neatness instead? I am a very messy person, which is actually one reason I like my mac. iTunes automatically organizes my music collection in a very accessible manner, with a few rules applied to mail I can quickly organize all my email messages, with expose I can find the window I need with the touch of a button(since I tend to leave too many open), and with spotlight I can quickly find the version of my resume I want to use with just a few terms. I am much more productive because I can be neat without having to slave over it. Time saving and neatness aren't mutually exclusive.
Monstar L
My desk is cluttered, my windows desktop is cluttered. Yet, I get more work done than the guy sitting next to me who is a clean freak. He spends hours cleaning and fixing his desk as well as daily organizing his files, managing his windows desktop, and productivity goes towards it. During meetings, he depends on documenting everything while you ask him in the hallway and he has no recollecting of any topics discussed unless he referred to his notes. What I realize is the clean freaks are spending too much processes on organizing not much on substance.
True personal clutter amounts to a chaotic system based on the mental patterns of the clutterer. There is a pattern in the chaos, but the initial state and the chaos function are in the mind of the creator, so while to any outside observer it just looks like a mess, to the creator it makes perfect sense.
My desk is covered by a six inch high mound of papers, optical discs and spare kit (no food, contrary to the accusations of other people), but I can find anything I want in that pile in under 15 seconds. The only thing that actually messes me up is when co-workers put things on my desk and don't tell me. I have an in-box on my door for that, but they like to stick things on my desk anyway, just so it can be my fault when I don't know about some new item.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Whether a messy person is more productive than a neat one depends on several factors, which the summary and article fail to mention -- I have no idea if the book touches on them.
1. Method of maintaining neatness. The article talks about time wasted maintaining neatness, and says that neatniks spend 1-4 hours per day on this. But I didn't see any discussion of time spent looking for lost items, nor did I see any mention of time-saving organizational techniques such as "handle it once" or file-as-you-go.
2. Type of production. Certain types of work demand organization -- such as information handling, accounting, etc. Messiness in those positions will be less efficient and productive than orderliness. Creative positions, on the other hand, may benefit from disorder.
Reading the article, I felt that no case was made for greater productivity by slobs. Yes, there was a discussion of certain factors make disorder potentially better in certain situations, but the headline overstates the summary. I'd like to read the book and see if the article understates, accurately summarizes, or overstates the book's conclusions.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
In the places I've worked, people's desks' messiness has been quite proportionate to their tech knowledge and productivity. They have been the most skilled, most productive, and also often the most humble and nice. Yet usually they are the ones least appreciated by the bosses...
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
It sounds to me like someone is trying to justify their sloppiness.
Visit an organized, smoothly operating factory; everything is neat and clean. Go so a good mechanic; the shop is organized and neat. From personal experience I have yet to deal with a slob that is exceptionally productive.
This is yet another example of cause and effect getting mixed up. I tend to keep my work and living space neat. I have trouble focusing when things are too much of a mess. More importantly, if things are disorganized I end up wasting too much time trying to find what I need. However, when I get busy, when I'm under a tight deadline, I tend to leave things a mess. I have more important things to do than to worry about cleaning up.
If anything, a mess is counter-productive. Again, I submit an example from personal experience. My father tends to be very disorganized with his tools. His office and workshop are both a mess. Although he will always insist he can find anything he needs if no one disrupts his mess. But then he'll spend twice as long working on something because he can't find tool he needs. And I can't count the times he's spent ages looking for something buried under all his paperwork.
So it's not necessarily that slobs are more productive, but that these people are possibly too busy to clean up. The guy who's workspace is always excessively neat probably has too much free time on his hands. I certainly believe that, but it doesn't mean slobs are somehow more productive.
While i want my house CLEAN - it is about as organized as any insane emu on acid would have anything organized. i mean i will clean house, but if i find a stack of papers or books or CDs, the just go into a stack. also, i don't hold on to a lot of things, i give away and throw away a lot of crap i don't use or need. that being said, clutter doesn't bother me that much. filth, on the other hand, bothers me.
But I can't count the number of times that either being more of a neatnik about something has saved me a huge headache or if I had been more organized how much of a headache I could have avoided.
Yes, if everything goes well then NOT taking the time to follow proper procedures will save you loads of time. However, proper procedures are there because when things go wrong (and they always do) you save more than just time. While the study may try to account for the time saved by being neat as not overcoming the time lost, a straight time-to-time comparison just doesn't cut it. For example, on Project A the Project Manager ensures that everyone follows a strict quality assurance plan. On Project B they let everyone handle their own quality and just trust that it is happening. Project A takes two weeks longer to deliver than originally anticipated because of some random occurence. Project B was affected by the same random occurence but launched early because they didn't go through a quality assurance process. Client suddenly realizes that Project B only half works and fumes but there's time to fix it. Project B then launches on-time (instead of early) after fixes. Even assuming Project B doesn't require additional fixes, Project A is better off because the client received a quality product the first time.
And furthermore, saying neat squashes creativity is the true slobs excuse for not trying. If your creative process is so fragile that it requires things to be cluttered all over the place, you're creative value is NILL.
Anyway, I doubt there will be too many people here who agree with this study, though there can certainly be cases where neatness is taken too far.
I wonder if this includes fat slobs?
"Brilliant!"
It's just an efficient hashing algorithm.
Canthros
I must've maxed out my productivity then...
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
If a messy desk is the sign of a messy mind, what is the empty desk a sign of?
Messy desk owners unite!
I'm a neatnik at heart, but a slob in practice.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I find that being a slob helps exercise my 3d spacial awareness skills. No kidding. I know where things are in my piles 'o' crap and can usually retrieve them instantly by plunging a hand in and grabbing them. It's an O(1) retrieval. Of course, when I forget it becomes O(n^2), but we don't discuss such things in polite company. :)
About 3 months ago our boss tagged us to get our office and network lab spotless and to throw out all the "junk we don't need." So far I have found that in our need to be really clean we threw away at least $5000 worth of stuff that was needed for future projects. Has anyone eles had problems like this.
Don't bother to RTFA. That was the only interesting thing in what is an incredibly lame piece of writing (presumably with a worse book to come).
So, now that I have saved you some time, clean your desk!
Why does it seem like so many neat-freaks are responding with their reasons why neatness is better as a rule, and why this article is bunk, but the slobbos tend to be responding with "clutter works for me because..." with the focus being on how they as individuals benefit? Why do the neat freaks seem to feel the need to impose their idea of "order" on everyone?
As in everything balance is key. You don't want to end up like these guys
Neatness is antithesis of creativity. While Clutter yields (at times) unexpected serendipitous convergence of seemingly un-related items.
...ect ... there would be no way I could have seen the new pattern. It would have been impossible. But because I saw the two things together, and saw something I never realized before, I was able to create some new idea.
My mother was a neat freak. A place for everything, and everything in its place. She could never understand how I knew where everything was in my piles of messes. Nor could she understand how I saw patterns in the seemingly random piles of stuff.
The time it finally hit me, was when I was looking for one thing or another (I don't remember the specifics, this was 25-30 years ago), I saw two things together, which suddenly gave me a brilliant idea of combination.
Now, if everything was in its place
Its like that movie Working Girl where the Melanie Griffith's charactor describes putting two un-related items together to solve a problem. In that case it was a wedding and someone wanting to get into TV Station Ownership.
Creativity often requires the serendipity of a confluence of unrelated items.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I bet I'm not the only one with a significant other that drives them nuts by tidying up all the time. A typical conversation might go something like this:
Me [settling down to watch a movie]: Where is the HMDI lead?
Her Wherever you last left it.
Me I left it on the floor behind the TV.
Her Well I haven't touched it.
Me You must have, it can't have moved itself.
Her I definately haven't moved it. You're always loosing things.
Me Do you even know what it is?
Her What is it?
Me It's a black cable. It was on the floor behind the TV.
Her Oh, I might have put it in one of the boxes in the shed.
Me [angry] So now I've got to put my shoes on and go out into the cold to look through all the boxes in the shed!
Her Don't blame me! You're the untidy one that is always loosing things...
An empty desk is an empty mind.
No trees were harmed in the posting of this message. However, a great number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
It may look like a bunch of piles of paper, but it's actually a distributed, chronologically ordered, stack-based filing system. Statistically, the most recently viewed/changed file will need to be accessed the most frequently in the short term, so those files are kept near the top of the file stack for quicker access.
Files further down on the stack are, of course, compressed.
=Smidge=
There are two kinds of "Messy": those who know where everything is, and those who don't.
:) Once I put a piece of paper down, I don't have a clue where where I left it. When I do have retrieve something, I have to search through the stack(s). OTOH, in my job I find that I rarely have to do that, especially since most important documents are stored electronically anyway. Of course the electronic documents aren't organized that much better, but search tools help me find things quickly enough, given a rough starting point.
For some people, the "mess" is actually a highly efficient personal organizing system. These people have huge stacks of papers in seemingly random locations, but they know exactly where a particular document is within those stacks and piles. If someone were to go in and "organize" their office, they would be completely lost and their productivity would suffer (as described in the article).
Then there are other people (like me) who are just plain messy
If I'm really busy (being productive) I don't have time to tidy my desk, whereas the last thing on my to do list (after reading all of slashdot) is to tidy my desk, so it stays tidy utill I have more work to clutter it with.
So people still let their personal worthiness be judged on their job productivity. While the world's employment figures of the last three decades don't show anything but the fact that productivity is the problem, not the solution. But no, everyone still seems to even derive some kind of part self-deluding, part self-destructive pride out of their being even more and more effectively exploited - whether with a cluttered or a most tidy desk...
Cheers,
d. d.
I have a feeling that this is going to find itself posted in a whole lot of offices and cubicles......
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
I am 54 years old and I was disorganized with my paper files long before buying my first computer in 1985. A computer makes it easy to be disorganized, whenever you need something do a search and find it. Search not only by filename you could use grep to search file contents, etc. Try do this with ten thousand paper files!
Why bother organizing your electronic files making directories within directories, when you can search for wathever you want?
IMPORTANT. NEVER save your files in a computer, ALWAYS use an external drive. At home and work I use about 12 different computers and it would be a nightmare if I left a few files in each of them. Computers are for operating systems and applications, not personal files. I actually dont have room for personal files, I usually have 4 to 6 operating systems per computer ( say two versions of windows - for compatibility, a linux 32bit and a linux 64 bit and the occasional Solaris for Intel or Free BSD). The new Intel Macs are a big problem, if you want Windows you cannot install more than 3 operating systems per hard disk (say MacOSX, a linux and Windows). I bought a Macbook and in order to be able to install 5 operating systems I had to replace the internal DVD drive by a second hard disk. I bouth a cheap USB/Firewire Box for slim optical laptop drives ($35 from Meritline.com) and put the optical drive in - I can boot from it.
...that moderation and doing things that come naturally instead of forcing it will always be better choices.
Just like all things, being moderately clean but not overdoing it will prove the best method. There's nothing wrong with having a bit of clutter, but everybody can be certain that a desk with several stacks (or simply a huge pile) of paper, folders, candy bar wrappers, CD's, pictures of family, nude magazines, post-it notes, immigrants (how did this one get in there?), and Pens where the girls clothes come off if you turn them upside down...well, I think the point is made...that's unlikely to be your most effective or efficient people.
Obviously, the other extreme is somebody who only has 3-5 objects on their desk, every item is categorically stored away in a folder/box with labels and an indexing system that could rival the Library of Congress. These people won't even keep an item out of it's place even if they know they aren't done using it.
Clearly, a middle ground is where the best people reside.
- Nobody would know what RTFA meant if it didn't need to be said all the time
This may be true, but think about most of your bosses making the good money. They're not messy. The inner ranks of business are about image, not necessarily results. Think Carly Fiorina, or any other executive.
Always someone has power over you. The thing to consider is this: Is the power good, or bad?
i am not a neat-freak, a cluttered desk with papers & CDroms does not bother me = i don't nitpick the appearance of my desk, on the other hand i am not a slob, i don't leave pizza crust & half eaten donuts laying around to attract bugs, somewhere in between those two extremes is my happy medium...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I'm easily the messiest person in my office, and as others have elaborated, I know generally where everything I need is located. There seem to be two aspects to clutter or messes: the items themselves, and the physical location of the items. Without any items, there is no mess, and therein lies my key to being messy, yet productive... I throw away absolutely everything that isn't important or replaceable. This still leaves some items strewn across my desk, but not a ton of stuff, so it doesn't look like I'm a disordered hoarder. Instead of grooming my items by physical location, I spend that time culling detritis, so that there are fewer false positives to rummage though when looking for an item.
YES! Trackball is the ULTIMATE in desk messers. We all laugh at you suckers still moving your hands around the desk -- we've got crap piled there!
...It's a mess I made, and I know where everything is. That's a rather self-centered view of productivity. One of the most important aspects of information is sharing. What happens if someone who owns a mess suddenly disappears? It's left to others to sort through the mess and reorganize it. Time lost now, minimizing time lost later, is much easier to deal with because you can account for it from the start. Once something unexpected occurs, it's much more difficult to manage the lost time.The famous Swedish chemist and medical doctor Berzelius weas visiting Davy's lab. One of Dr. Berzelius companyons said "Look Dr. Berzelius how messsy and disorganized this lab is". Berzelius answered: "Only lazy chemists have neat and clean labs"
Truth, all the way. Although I have found the warehouse model (see Fry's) to work well for me, too.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
I always show up at pro-environment protests with a big sign that reads "POLLUTION CREATES JOBS"
I am no slob. (Though I'm culturally half-Slav ;-)
It is a matter of power throttling.
I try to keep my code very neat and clean. Because it is easier to work with that way and the modern tools help keep it that way.
Similarly, when I work on equipment or car, I'm lining up the screws in the order I remove them, there's nothing near the soldering iron holder, the iron's cord is routed where it won't get stepped on or pulled, and so on.
I like to think I'm exceptionally neat when it counts.
And my "clutter" is actually fairly organized: it *is* a stack and *I know FORTH!*
The problem is when neat people and messy people insist on inflicting *their* workstyle on others, as if it was a universal law.
The only person who gets to do that is the boss.
"archaeological filing system" def'n: the deeper down in the pile you dig, the older stuff is.
Simple. Effective.
The argument that all businesses need to keep their data organized is not a valid counter-argument. Of course corporate data needs to be filed away in an organized and neat matter, and is worth spending the time/money to do so, because you need efficient access to the data to stay in business. THE DIFFERENCE is that the data gets organized such that multiple people will have access to the data. Hence, there needs to be a common logical organization to the data and that must be followed religiously.
On the other hand, the only person who needs access to my personal papers is me. So they get dumped into piles (seemingly randomly to other people), when in fact I'm able to find them pretty quickly (financial papers are near the window under the stack of CDs, etc). As long as this system works for me, then there is no problem.
Oh, and for the record, I'm a database administrator at work. I'm a slob at the personal level, but I know the importance of having OUR data organized efficiently and logically (normalized) such that OTHER people are able to find the information quickly themselves.
Sounds sorta like a caching algorithm. As items are used, they are left on top. Temporal locality says that all the important items will be on top of the other items.
But then we get a garbage collection algorithm, too. Every so often, the short-lived objects which are no longer important are removed in your tidying process.
:(){
I have a really good memory. I rarely take notes and I seldom need to reference old documents as I am able to pull information out of my head even if it's months or years old. As a result, spending a lot of time maintaining organization doesn't make sense for me. At the same time, I realize that some people need to keep detailed notes to remember things and need to frequently reference old documents. People like that need to be organized to be productive.
One mans' trash can, is another mans' organizer ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Every person should now its place in the society, now that is order! Slaves are slaves, masters are masters!
File cabinets seem to be blackholes. Once something goes in, it is just a record, not work. So, current projects take up desk space.
This is quite different from the principle "a place for everything and everything in its place." Aboard ship you need to have everything stowed for safety and the ability to find things in a hurry.
For very big thinkers like Bucky Fuller, a dymaxion file can work, but for me at least I need a dymaxion pile.
For people interested in managing productivity it might be a good idea to think about providing a desk per project rather than a desk per person.
--
Couldn't think of a solar tag for this one.
Now for the priority queue, when I'm a little messy, the important stuff floats to the top. As the mess gets higher and deeper, after a while the stuff on the bottom becomes unimportant, and can then be cleaned up (similar to garbage collection).
The weakness here is that if something has BECOME unimportant, that means it WAS important, and you didn't do anything about it. It's fine if things that were NEVER important don't get addressed and eventually fall into garbage collection, but letting things that WERE important reach garbage collection because you missed doing something about them when they WERE important is a bad thing.
Or put another way, the notice of foreclosure on your house may not be important if you don't do anything about it until they've foreclosed on you, but by the time your 'nifty' organizational system's garbage collection routine removes it from your work area, you've lost your house (and your work area).
What I've learned to do is supplement my system with a To-Do list. Then even if something important starts to slide under some other things, it doesn't slide off the to-do list, and at least not doing important things is an intelligent decision resulting from more important things needing to be done than just letting something slide until there's no point in dealing with it anymore.
paintball
Aren't a lot of coding conventions really just "neatness" applied to the programming domain?
Blinky's desk is a heap. Ask him to find a post-it, it's right on top. Ask him to find a functional spec from six months ago, he's got to sift through everything. After he uses them he leaves them on top of the desk.
Pinky's desk is totally neat. Ask him to find a post-it, he opens the drawer for "P", does binary search, then finds the post-it. Ask him to find a functional spec from six months ago, that's under "F", same thing. After he uses them, he puts them both away, same procedure. If he's got to refer to the spec ten times, he finds it and puts it away ten times.
Inky's desk has a heap on top but the drawers are sorted. He can find a post-it as fast as Blinky and the spec from six months ago as fast as Pinky. When he's done he leaves the post-it on top of the desk and puts the spec back in its proper place. Though the second time he has to refer to the spec, he leaves it on his desk. Every few months he finds his heap is slow, so he puts everything that he hasn't used in the last week away in the proper drawer.
A clean desk is a sign of a sick mind!
As someone who has lived both extremes, I wish to share my experiences as a system/network admin.
For years I have worked with a cluttered desk and big piles of documents, until the director of the company got quite upset about it.
I then started to "organize" everything, it took me at least two weeks to do that. Then I started to use the bestpractical.com ticketing system and I numbered all documents and put them in ordners. I had everyone to e-mail their requests to the ticketing system. After about half a year I realized I spend so much time documenting and organizing that I didn't even have time to actually talk to my colleagues about things, I became a giant bureaucracy and a gigantic amount of time went into organizing.
Then I decided to stop with the ticketing system and I went back to clutter, which made me much more productive again, but complaints about the clutter reappeared again after a while. I got so angry about it that I just took my entire pile of stuff and just threw it away (I only keep the -really- important stuff), what I have noticed is that all the lost information didn't cause any problems.
The thing I've learned is that the best way to stay organized without spending too much time organizing is to just throw things away if it isn't an absolutely certain fact I will need it again in the near future. It appears to be the best solution between clutter and organization.
"I have trouble focusing when things are too much of a mess."
And there is the crux of the issue. There are a large portion of the population that simply cannot concentrate. If you cannot remember where a hundred items are, what do you do? You put them in some kind of system that allows you to figure out where they are when you need them. This is why messy people often seem smarter. People with good memories don't NEED to be tidy. They might choose to be tidy, but it is not a requirement. The other side of that is when people who have poor memories have a messy desk. These people can never find anything. Not because their desk is messy, but because their desk is messy AND they can't remember where they put stuff. A tidy desk is a crutch. This is only a problem when you have someone who needs the crutch, and refuses to use it.
We see this same issue with noise. Some of use can work quite well with all sorts of noise going on around out, as we do have the ability to focus on our task at hand. Others get confused and disoriented when there is noise around them. They are often heard complaining about noisy offices.
Way too many times.
On the other hand the wife calls me obsessive compulsive because I believe that the mayo
should be put back on the same shelf and in the same location it was found.
My cube, my method. Your cube your method. But the lab should be organized by consensus or
edict such that all can find things.
Nothing is foolproof, fools are too ingenious. - Murphy
I think that's pretty obvious: investing 1h now into organizing things you're never going to look at again is likely wasted. OTOH, if you can't do your taxes because you lost all your tax documents, need to spend many hours trying to get new copies, and pay stiff penalties, that's no good either.
So, you really need "just enough" organization to get the things done you need to get done. That means that most paperwork can just go into a big filing box, but a few things need to be kept separate.
However, the term "slob" has connotations of dirt and bad odors; if all your interactions are on-line, it may be efficient not to worry about that either, but if you occasionally want to meet up with people in person, some degree of cleanliness is probably a good idea.
My wife is a neatnik. She always likes things in order.
:)
However, she is the most productive worker in her department... as long as her desk stays organized.
If things get slightly out of order, it takes her several hours to get things back the way she wants it, and occasionally she feels that her design isn't 100% efficient, so she'll reorganize. Once she's satisfied, she switches into high speed and rarely makes mistakes.
At home, her desk is a mess. Go figure
I have a theory based on very limitted observation that those people who have a very tidied physical workspace have a very disorganized virtual workspace (you know, the ones with 200 icons on their desktop), while those with disorganized physical workspaces are much better at keeping their virtual workspaces organized.
Anyone else noticed this (or am I just off my rocker as usual)
Said one professor to another upon seeing his messy desk, "A cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind."
In retort, while looking down upon his collegue's bare desktop, "Ah yes, but it's better than an empty desk."
For me, clutter is a function of being busy and not so much a matter of disorganization. Eventually, when I have "nothing better to do" I clean up the mess. When I see someone who always has an immaculate desk I think, "Now there's a bureaucrat who doesn't have much important work to do." When I see a techy with a messy desk I think, "Now there's someone who's busy because he's doing stuff that matters." And for those whose desk I've never seen I think, "This person may be busy but mostly they're just a slob."
Life is like a trapese act... It's a matter of maintaining balance or taking a fall.
me
Parent: "Your room is a mess that has no equal in recorded history, you need to clean it up"
Teenager: "What? You WANT me to fail my SATs?"
Parent: "Nevermind"
1) No one should be surprised that people with OCD that manifests as a need to clean actually waste time by cleaning. It's the nature of the beast. Hell, it's intuitive.
2) Leaving papers scattered, albeit in some esoteric semblance of order, around one's desk does allow one to pipeline and/or cache SOME tasks. It's still no solution whatsoever for long term data access. The less organization and tidying you do, the harder it's going to be to find old data. Archiving is a situation where you can't live WITHOUT a "neat freak".
3) God forbid something happens and you can't come in to work unexpectedly. It won't matter if you're in traction or just have a cold; the time you save in NOT organizing your desk will be more than offset by the added time, headaches, and stress induced in the sorry SOB whose job it is to find some critical piece of information on the project that needs to be finished on time.
-I'm a lazy slob?
I drank what? -- Socrates
I'm a slob, stupid and unproductive. Take that science!
I, personally, am a neat person at work. I'm a slob at home, but that's because I don't have the time to clean. Putting everything in a specific and delineated place is not only intelligent, but stifles confusion. It may stifle creativity -- I mean, what's more creative than putting toilet paper rolls in the living room? What's more creative than finding the toilet plunger in your car just in case? My point is that this might be true for the SLIGHTLY messy, but for those that are absolute slobs, I beg to differ. There's no way that being a complete mess is more productive or better than having things placed in order. If you have to actively search for an item, that takes time. If everybody put stuff away where it was suppose to go, there'd not only be more room for extra items (organization makes room for more things), but there'd also be no need to search for things. If an item is always in the same place, it'll be a cinch to find. To sum this up, I'm going to have to say: "bulls***"
At home, my space is an utter disaster. We're talking 'can barely see floor' disaster. But I know where every last damned thing in the room is. I have had someone ask me for something, and I tell them that it's in the pile on their left, in the first dozen or so papers...only to have them run screaming from the room...but it was there!
I have had people attempt to clean the room 'for me', only for me to catch them in the act and chase them out... And it takes months for me to find everything they 'cleaned up'.
There's two kinds of mess; total omg wretched mess, and my mess. It may look like I'm eligible for federal disaster assistance, but it's not like I've got food kicking around. It's not like there's a month-old quarter of a sub with some chips, under a pile of things on my desk, no. It's just a mess of STUFF.
Now, in order to appease certain entities, I am indeed cleaning the apartment... But already, I feel like I did for the week or two after I built my new computer and hadn't gotten all my old stuff copied over yet... Really helpless and unable to access anything important. We shall see.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
I keep everything organized. The stacks may not be lined up perfectly in a straight edge, but they're in definite stacks in their own trays for specific purposes and every case always finds itself in the appropriate tray for retrieval.
/could/ pile up, but I might as well just take care of it right now and perpetuate the clean slate.
However, I find that a clean environment at home promotes a more energetic mindset for me. I make no pretense that this is applicable to anyone else, I'm just curious if this sounds familiar to anyone else.
When I'm surrounded by a mess I feel lazy and sluggish, I'd rather just let the piles accumulate and take care of them all at once...at some point "later on". When my room is neat and tidy, and I'm holding an object, it's just one object to set away to perpetuate the pleasantly clean atmosphere. So I do it. And it bleeds over into other small mundane tasks. I see small but annoying errands that I
An example from this last week: My light burned out and I sat in the dark refuse-filled room for a day or two before replacing the bulb, lit only by the glow of my monitors and laptop. I replaced the bulb, and cleaned everything up. I'm sure you can picture the constrast in atmosphere, you might also be able to see how my mindset is also affected in part by it.
didn't accomplish anything.
I should also point out that this may correlate to a tendency to procrastinate. More procrastinators make use of "pebble" tasks in order to either feel good about themselves while avoiding the more challenging "stone" tasks, or as a tactic to achieve a few of the more minor goals in order to ramp themselves up to get motivated for the bigger tasks they are avoiding.
2012, 2012, 2012 ... 5 years off and already I *hate* the Mayan calendar.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
The person describing it as messy doesn't have access to the pointers, so doesn't see the organizational scheme.
However, a person's memory of pointers fades, and when NOBODY has access to the pointers, then it is, unequivocably, a mess. The task, then, is to organize marginally faster than your memory loss rate.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Pssst, I have a secret! You can be a slob _AND_ have a neat desk at the same time!!! Maybe it's my German inbreeding, but I have discovered an inborn knack for making even the most disorganized piles of crap look orderly by following one simple Germanic rule: ...make everything orthogonal! Whoohooooo! It takes only seconds, the piles can stack up in Kafkaesque extreme, but no matter how big they get, you look like you've got it together. Finely tuned German aesthetic sensibilities and cognitive disarray can live in harmony!
And "people who can afford a cleaning service" but that's too long to embroider on a sampler. The rest of us have more interesting things to do.
my wife and I have different tolerances of clutter and approaches to tidying: I don't mind a pile of random (to be filed) things, or some such, being left out when company's coming over. She would much rather that the surfaces are empty/cleared, and doesn't mind stuffing drawers to the brim with wholly unrelated things.
In short: I would rather have something left lying out rather than put away in the wrong place; she would rather put something away in the wrong place than leave it lying out...
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
As someone who suffers from OCD and TTM (although some say they are one and the same affliction) as well as a moderate case of germophobia, I can attest to this. Usually the uber-organized among us do have some sort of mental health issues, and making sure our Coke can is equidistant to the back and side of our desks is our way of coping.
However, productivity and quality are two different things. I work with someone who is the antithesis of neat and orderly. Spilled food on his clothes, papers strewn every which way, a whiteboard with approximately 3.4 cm^2 of unused space, etc. We are both technical equals, but he does seem to turn out more work than I do. However, my code is easy to read and well commented, and my system proposals are well-organized things of beauty. His code will occasionally contain a line break, and his customer communications are a hodge-podge of spelling and grammar mistakes, with some questionable colloquialisms thrown in for good measure. Guess who the customer prefers to work with, even if it tacks on an extra week or three to the end of the project?
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
I work with many PhD level people here and I agree with this assessment. I see piles of papers stacked several feet high and their desk... er work area (a desk doesn't have enough surface area) there is barely any place to put a laptop down. Most of them are so concentrated on work they don't have time to clean up the piles of papers and other stuff, unless they have look for something.
My desk is messy, but it is a cache of recently used and needed stuff. I always work like that, I print a lot of shit off and sit on the Loo or outside having a smoke with the papers and a pencil. Every now and again I trash 90% of the crap that hasnt been looked at in a while.
No one has touched upon it, but I'll give it a shot:
:)
Why in Oracle's name are we still amassing paper on our desks???
I used to be extremely messy, with post-its and papers scattered around in piles and finally mounds. In the mid to late 80's I started to think - 'wait a minute! I've got this wonderful information processing machine, and I know how to program it - why don't I go paperless?'
The first thing I started with was text based - mostly chicken scratch on post-it notes. I transcribed the current 'open' items in this category into my computer (I had one of the early laptops at that time), and started to refer to my notes in the computer. More importantly I forced myself to use the computer to enter new notes!
After that I started to investigate other options. For names and addresses I found a virtual 'rolodex' program - goodbye paper based address book. I built up a bibliography list of books I owned as well as ones I was interested in aquiring, with brief descriptions of their contents - this went into a database, so I could search the dataset.
Over the years this system has become more sophisticated. I have blogs, a wiki, and a CMS (content management) system that I use to collect and search for my writings. On my computer is a virtual post-it 'sticky notes' program that I use to scratch out quick notes, and I've started to digitize, upload, and meta-tag just about anything I get my hands on. Some of these systems are connected to databases to provide access to additional information sources through the web.
My desk at home is essentially empty. Everything important resides in my laptop, or on a server that I can access from my laptop.
At work, when people try to hand me paper, I tell them to put it up on our work CMS system (that I put into place for that purpose) -- now most folks are getting into it, and seeing the advantage of being able to go to the website, and search for the doc there, instead of trying to keep track of it themselves on paper. What little paper I am not able to redirect is either filed (e.g. finance and billing records - some battles you can not win), or in one small folder that sits on my desk called 'working'; if the item is small enough, I either scan it, or transcribe it into my own notes in the computer. Most things are generated electronically - so people are usually willing to either send me an electronic copy, or upload it to the website themselves. The added benefit of having documents online is as changes occur - you don't have to worry about keeping your paper version syncronized with the online version.
What clutter there is has been 'virtualized' (e.g. working documents and scraps on my computer) - and much of it has simply gone away (nice to be able to slap a document into a CMS, attach some meaningful - and searchable - meta information about the document, and then forget about it). I try to limit the time I spend on paper, prefering an electronic document on my desktop to paper, and a URL for the document to the electronic document on my desktop.
I also spend much less time 'cleaning up' than my neighbors - because I largely don't have to (put a book or two on the shelf and I'm done). It amazes me how much cruft people print out and pile in their offices. It doesn't have to be that way - it is the 21st Century after all...
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I work in a 20'x20' room with (at times) 6 other people (4 usually). This room also houses computers, monitors, keyboards, etc. along with tools like RJ45 crimpers, screw-drivers, cable-testers, installation CDs etc. These tools and equipment items are shared by the rooms community. I have several times launched into a neatness/tidy-up tirade and chastised my co-workers for not putting things back 1)where they found them OR 2)where they belong. I've pretty much been on this same soapbox at home with my wife and son. Of course, I have been labeled 'anal retentive', 'obsessive-compulsive', 'neat-freak', etc. Ironically, I look around the room and my personal workspace is just as messy as everyone elses. So here's my message to all of you highly intelligent, creative, highly-productive slobs that have found new empowerment in this article. Be as messy as you want with YOUR stuff and YOUR space, but please keep YOUR mess from mingling with MY mess...and let's keep the things we share organized and tidy so we can find them when we need them. Thank you.
You, sir, are just anal! And incredibly frusterating! My muscle memory automatically adds 2 spaces after a period... Now, you tell me there are only certain times when I'm supposed to use 2. This is almost as bad as the time my teacher tried to tell me 'where' a comma is supposed to go in a sentence. Many children died as the result of safety scissor wounds. Who decided this - we'll have them shot tomorrow at sunup!
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Who the f*** decided that sentences on the Internet shall no longer be formatted with two spaces after a period?!
I'm so glad I'm not the only one irked by this. There's no way for me to undo years of habit and start typing a single space. If modern browsers want to close up the space, fine... but I'm going to keep typing two spaces.
What's frustrating is when automatic HTML formatting tools like Nvu automatically turn the second space into a non-breaking space (nbsp). Half my sentences end at the end of a line and have a CRLF after them, which is treated like a normal space... and the result is that some sentences are separated by single spaces, and others are separated by two spaces. Worse, though: if a sentence is at the start of a line, but has nbsp at the start, my left margin is shot. D'oh!
Wow. Thanks for giving me an excuse to get *that* off my chest.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I would assume that the reason slobs would be more productive is that they have to use more of their brain keeping track of what they need is in what place. Keeping things neat would only mean that your brain gets lazy and your brain would want to keep that laziness state. Giving it things to do constantly would make it want to constantly working state.
I don't know about you, but my linux "desktop" is a mess too. It occurs to me that this is a great way to manage all those desktop icons. Feature request for Nautilus/Konq?
Icons used in the last week (for example) stay on the desktop. Icons not used in the past week go into a virtual desktop folder marked 'Older Stuff' or some such. The top level of this folder contains icons used in the last month and a series of (virtual) folders marked 'spreadsheets', 'text files', 'documents', etc. These folders hold icons that haven't been used in over a month (or whatever), grouped by type. Once a user clicks on anything in this folder or the type-based subfolders, it goes back to the desktop automatically, and waits to get aged out again.
Basically just age-based and type-based search folders for desktop icons. Configurable, of course.
Good? Bad? Ugly? You decide.
I find that often the neater person throws away more stuff. This leads to two things:
1. their space stays more neat
2. they usually don't have important stuff unless it's current, so they pull the lazy 'tude and say "go to so and so, he keeps everything". In which case, messy pack rat person is either saving the day or is overworked because neat boy can't handle dealing with old stuff.
Now, there are obvious divisions of importance as perceived by the individual, but generally, I find what I say to be true.
I call it "chaotic organization". It isn't a mess, nor is it cluttered, nor is it disorganized. Decades ago I proved it to my mother who quit nagging me to 'clean my room'. One day I got fed up with it and told her it was not messy or organized, just chaotic to her, and that I knew where everything was. So she quizzed me. She would ask me where something was and I'd tell her. She would then check. After about 15 minutes of this she realized I was right. And quit nagging me about my room's "chaotic organization".
What is sad to me is that we still have people that insist that there is one best way for pretty much everything. Well, the "neatness nazis" are claiming their way is best, most "chaotic organization" people simply say theirs works for them. Go figure.
My desk is chaotically organized. I've found the phrase "A clean desk is a sure sign of a sick mind" quite appealing. My computer racks are strictly categorized as are my woodworking and automotive tools. Even to the point of the drawers being labeled (that's new and still advancing however). There is a good reason why for me one works in one area and fails in another.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Not to nitpick (I agree with what you way) I don't think "causational" is a word. The word you want is "causal" Cheers!
This is simply the P/J scale on the MBTI. This has been around for over half a century.
Amazing on people are reinventing the wheel over and over again.
Have you read my journal today?
I know I'm a 'slob'. I also happen to have ADD which happens to support my slob tendencies. I rarely do laundry unless all my clothing is dirty. I rarely do dishes unless almost all my dishes are dirty. I rarely vacuum or clean the living room unless it's very clearly disorganized. Now with most of my days actions, I care to do things all at once (when I'm really focused to do whatever I'm doing at the moment) because I for some reason I feel I'm more efficient that way. After all, I can study effectively for courses when I'm interested and focused on them much more than when I'm not, and I usually have to spend less time trying to remember yesterday's lecture subject when I do my homework after class versus days later. This all applies to my cleanliness in the same way. I hate cleaning, and doing laundry, and doing dishes, so I wait as long as I can to do them in order to reduce the amount of time I have to spend on those areas. If I lug all 4 bags of my laundry into the laundromat every month, that saves me the 40 minutes of driving I'd have to do if I chose to do my laundry once a week. Essentially the laws of cleaning are governed by thermodynamics, stuff always becomes dirty (stuff likes to expand whence it came), so no matter how many times I clean, I'll have to clean more. Tolerating the few dirty plates on my coffee table reduces those minutes of my life (which I'll never ever get back) having to clean the junk up. Now when a few girls come over, that's a different story...
You can't take the sky from me...
(Ellen Ullman)
That would David Gelernter, running a leaf blower through his office to get some work done.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I have room mates who have problems cleaning up after themselves and keeping common spaces uncluttered. It goes beyond the generic version of this, though. It's really a fascinating situation. I'm not a particularly neat person, but I find myself regularly cleaning all the dishes and putting stuff away after them so that we have a functional kitchen, and each time I've seen them unconsciously/on-purpose mess it up within a very few minutes. They like to exist in a state of chaos either because it fits their head-space, (very creative energetic people).
Okay. If I don't mind cleaning, which I don't, then things tend to work nicely.
However, whenever I decide not to clean for some reason, or if I go away for a week, I'll come back to such a state of chaos that you cannot even move through the house. (Stacks of junk in doorways which you can't even see over, style-chaos). Interestingly, when it gets like this, the mood in the house disintegrates quickly. When just walking around becomes frustrating, and when you can't perform basic day-to-day functions like cooking food because all the pots and pans are dirty and you can't clean them because the sink is over-flowing with dirty plates preventing you from even reaching the faucet, and you can't even get to the sink because there is a sewing machine and box of books and a fully-deployed laundry-drying rack filling the minimal floor space left over. . . Well, a lot of your energy and awareness are used up just trying to perform basic survival functions. When a small problem arises which requires quick actions and quick thought and free energy, it instantly balloons into a full-scale emergency with people shouting and crying and hurting themselves. I've felt at such times like a claustrophobic in a submarine. I am not exaggerating on any of these points.
Now, I've always felt that the home is supposed to be a relaxing place, and the kitchen is the very heart of the home. When there is so much clutter and mess that simple living becomes an exercise in frustration, then it means that there is no place to relax in your own home. This affects not just the mood, but health. As an experiment, I decided to stop cleaning for two weeks. Wow! I watched the state of mental and physical health in my room mates drop like a rock. Everybody was tired and sick and angry. When I'd finally seen enough, I told them that it was time for them to clean up and that I was beginning to get angry with them for being so disrespectful. I didn't have to push hard, but it did take some firm words. In the end I got them to clean it all up. Almost instantly, the mood of the house became positive and health problems vanished. Life started to flow again.
They still have trouble with cleaning. I'm moving out next month, and they have a baby on the way, so it'll be interesting to see how things go. (I don't nag at all, but I have casually told them that their kind of preferred environment simply won't work for a baby, and without me around to keep the chaos in a manageable state, things are going to go bad fast unless they learn some basic living skills fast. To this end, I've stopped cleaning again, (except for my own stuff which I always stay on top of), and have been applying some mental pressure towards their learning how to run a house. They're picking it up slowly, and I wish them the very best of luck with it. We'll have to see how it goes when I'm gone. I've seen bad in other young parents, and it can lead to horrible living environments and terrible health problems, so I really do hope they 'get' it.
Anyway, my point is that the article might be right in some respects, -Ordered chaos is a great state to be in as it offers up tons of ideas and random energy which are wonderful for a creative mind. But chaos which tips the balance too far will screw you up and make you angry and sick.
Or to make a long story short. . , There's Ordered Chaos and there's just plain old Chaos.
You have to pick.
-FL
i knew it was a good idea to put 'slob' on my resume.
"Found to be" sounds like this was a research paper or something, but it sounds instead like just some dude blabbing in a book! I was disappointed. :\
Yup - my parents have been married for 40 years this year and they go through that same fight usually 3 or 4 times a day AT LEAST!
Libertas in infinitum
...How can you tell the DEC field rep with a flat tire?
He's the one in the nice suit changing every tire to see which one's flat.
How can you tell the DEC field rep who's run out of gas?
He's the one in the nice suit changing every tire to see which one's flat.
I was a janitor for about 17 years with my Dad (grades 3-11 after dinner 5x a week), and then a hospital orderly. Both exposed me, from an early age, to the day-to-day cycle of tidying up. I think that did something to my approach to clutter. Now, having had some kind of office/desk for over 25 years, my approach is to clean up when it bugs me most, and when i can enjoy the new state most. I keep "dirty" at bay, because I'm not _that_ much of a slob, but "tidy" is really not worth micromanaging. Plus, there are better anal-retentive moments of satisfaction at the end of tidying up (or mowing the lawn or shovelling the walks or washing the windows) because I enjoy the _contrast_ between the old messy and the new tidy. ... and it's a satisfying way to procrastinate!
Exactly! When i was in Engineering (and even still), i basically just made piles around my room (i liked to call them "que stacks"), and shoved more important things (when they required more mobility) into various folders. The most important folder was my red "TODO!!!" folder. After that came the "current" folder, followed by the "somewhat important" folder, the "do later" folder, and the "FUN!!!" folder (that usually had Scientific American's and printed internet articles in it ;D ).
Other than that, i threw recent lecture notes onto a clipboard and two clipboard-like-folders that held them until i had enough time to put them into their actual binders, which was like, once every two weeks. It didnt matter if anything was in a binder, since i was always re-reading stuff.
The biggest problem i had wasnt finding stuff, it was moving about without knocking stuff over, and the heat of summer. Once you get really hot, you just instinctively turn on the fan, and suddenly everything you were working on goes all to hell. Which is why i started weighing down piles with textbooks - the papers cant get knocked over, OR fanned!
From AI Koan...
"In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe" Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
Wow, you are correct, a paging alogrithm much more accurately describes the procedure.
/. population is probably more aware of garbage collection than paging. So, the comment was possibly more effective over the average of all of slashdot.
However, the greater
And, it does not make it a complete waste of time for work_process, because the working set for a process usually does not include all of its pages in memory. Indeed, the page faults will return the working set to memory quite effectively, leaving the stuff which hasn't been touched in ages paged out to disk.
It would be technically more efficient to avoid work_process' working set, if you could. This could be approximated by leaving the "top layer" of the desk on the desk, but filing away everything underneath it, since the top layer will likely contain the most important items.
Glad to see your education at work!
:(){
If a person's daily work flow doesn't involve much interaction with others, then I don't think organization is important. However, if I have to cover for my slovenly co-worker, then organization is critical. A good example would be code development. If I'm writing code for a script or small standalone app, my code's organization/documentation isn't really that important. If I can understand it, then that's all that counts. But if other developers are involved, then the code needs to be standardized (organized). This also extrapolates to desks and physical work environments. In my current job at a small business, I sometimes have to cover for a sales rep who is unavailable to take a customer's call. If that sales rep's desk is a mess (to me), then it's nearly impossible for me to coherently communicate with the customer. If the desk is organized, I can generally find the info I need to handle the customer.
I worked at Boeing back in the early nineties. They were bringing over a lot of Japan's business methodologies, such as quality improvement, work flow, etc. One of the things they implemented was the three CCCs, which while I don't remember what the abreviation stands for, translated to cleanliness and organization. They applied it to the entire company, from the plant floor to the tool shops to the offices. It was an extensive and expensive project. I seriously doubt Boeing would have engaged if there wasn't an ROI. I would like to know that the plane I'm flying on was built in a clean and organized environment. Do you want the engineer with the messy desk pushing changes down to the shop floor, where a similarly disorganized mechanic is installing wiring harnesses to the flight controls? Not me. I'll take the anal-retentive guy every time.
Neatness does not imply productive ease of access and mess does not imply disorganization.
That's true, and I'm messy, but I find that neat and organized beats neat or messy any day.
But, it's only optimized for reads and searches, O(n). Insertion is hard as you have to build your indexes, O(n log n), perhaps.
Seriously, I know 'neat' people who just shove crap into drawers to look neat and can't find anything. Insertion is O(1) but reads and searches are n^2 time.
A messy desk is more like O(1) for inserts and O(n log n) for searches and reads. One nice advantage is you data automatically winds up in a chronologically sorted stack, and if that can work as a priority queue for your problem, bonus. But once you do a search and read your data structure falls apart.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider the garbage collection consequences.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I like your analysis.
The only change I'd make is that neat people suffer greater access times due to the differences in the physical media. The seek time for eyeballs on the desktop is much lower than the seek time on the hands in the cabinet.
A messy desk is like a big L2 cache and a neat desk is a cache-less system (everything is relegated to secondary storage). A messy person might suffer from O(n^2) search on their desktop, but its on a very low latency system. Physically delving into a filing cabinet always takes longer than scanning the desktop, even if the the organized cabinet access is O(n).
The optimum combines both a "messy" desktop cache and an organized "neat" secondary storage medium but that seems like a rarity among humans.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The convention of two spaces after a period is a very American one. Because web pages are written in HTML, adding two spaces does nothing. The same is true in many word processors when dealing with fonts that don't have fixed character widths. If you are an English teacher, I understand your problem. If you are just a punctuation freak, get over it. Read the HTML specification and think about your experience with word processors, those after wordstar, and ask yourself when the last time having one space kept you from understanding what was being said.