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."

Comments

Re:Indeed?

[hoshino]

I think you are missing the point. Messy people aren't more productive because they save time on not clearing things up. The theory is that our brains are not organized in the same orderly manner as books on a library shelf. Our minds are actually quite messy and random, which allows us to be flexible and creative by linking seemingly unrelated things together in an instance. A messy desk may just be a physical manifestation of our thought process which is why we are more comfortable with it than with an unnatural sorting system.

Re:I know where stuff is

[slaker]

Clutter hint:
Switch to a trackball as your primary pointing device. That way you'll have an extra square foot or so of horizontal desk surface on which to pile things!

Re:Absolutes are almost never correct

[Anonymous Coward]

John T. Molloy in his book "How To Work The Competition Into the Ground & Have Fun Doing It" found the opposite to be true. While he was naturally a messy person, he found that he had to revise his original conclusion that organization was unimportant and found that the organized person was a better worker. Of course, being organized does not necessarily being neat. As long as their is a place for everything, one is organized no matter how it appears to others.

Re:Indeed?

[rodney dill]

Dude (shaking head), People with Anorexia HAVE a disorder, they aren't necessarily organizing things in a disorderly fashion.

As for me I'm set, I'm pretty messy

Re:Indeed?

[iocat]

Wait... I'm a slob/perfectionist and I like videogames. Actually I have no problem keeping a room clean if I know where everything goes (such as a bathroom, or our TV/family room). It's stuff that I don't have a specific place for (interesting magazine articles, stocking stuffers, videogame tchotskes, mail) that piles up and requires great effort (and great levels of nagging by my SO) to deal with. I also know why there is only one space after a period -- you don't need two spaces after a period if you're using a porportionally spaced font. See here for more details, esp. as relates to the interwebs. I found that article while I was digging through my desk looking for last year's girl scout cookies.

Re:Indeed?

[Cauchy]

Um, did anyone follow the thread? The post to which I responded made the real point that it wasn't believed that having a neat desk CAUSED the productivity. Rather, it was believed to be the "hidden node" of creativity that was the related factor. I was just summarizing it with a beloved phrase. As a PhD statistician who does research in modern statistics, I certainly was not nor would I advocate that we not study correlations---I make my living developing new methods to look at relationships between variables, for gosh sake!!!

Re:Indeed?

[Moebius Loop]

--
Who the f*** decided that sentences on the Internet shall no longer be formatted with two spaces after a period?! All this talk of perfectionism forced me to correct your sig on this small point.

The Internet has nothing to do with the absence of two spaces after periods. The current typographic standard dictates that two spaces are only used when the selected font is monospaced, like Courier, Monaco, or the terminal font. When using a proportionally spaced font, the second space is unnecessary.

Re:Indeed?

[Tacvek]

The real truth is that a messy desk is actually a vertical FIFO sort -- most recently used thing on top.

Don't you mean LIFO (Last-in, First-out) sort? Even that is a broken analogy though. It is really more of a stack where elements are popped from whatever position and pushed on the front. (As such it should be implemented as a doubly linked list internally if memory allows [stacks are bad at allowing elements deep inside themselves to be popped], but the interface to the user is stack-like). It tends to have 2 attributes. Frequently used items tend to be near the top, and recently used items tend to be near the top. Thus in most cases you narrow down your search time significantly as you are most likely to be needing something recently used or frequently used.

Re:Indeed?

[UncleTerry]

It's called the Naguchi Filing System. You can use envelopes or folders filed vertically in cabinets, or just file horizontally on your deck next to the roller mouse and also next to the phone. The floor works well for large projects. The prior art on the system was probably my album collection back in the sixties. And don't forget to try it in the workshop or the junk drawer in the kitchen.

Re:Indeed?

[SoapDish]

The two spaces rule actually came about because of typewriters. It used to be that typesetters and printers used a special block, giving them 1.5 spaces. When the type writer came out, every character had to be the same width. To maintain the wider space after the switch, it became custom to use two spaces, making the space after a sentence even longer.

Now, with modern word processors, the extra space after a period is handled for you. Therefore, the need to add two spaces is unnecessary. Infact, we're back to the point where it is advisable not to use multiple spacing characters in any situation. Think of how annoying it is when people uses spaces in Word instead of tabs, or multiple tabs instead of setting the proper position of the first one. LaTeX is a great example of the priority of consistent typesetting.

I don't know how this applies to the web, but I didn't see any double spaces used in your post.