It's OK To Be Messy...Even Advantageous.

A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, by David Freedman, made me feel a little better about myself, that maybe I'm not so bad after all. He claims,

“Moderate disorderly people, systems and organizations, systems frequently turn out to be, in general, more efficient, more resilient, more effective, and more creative than highly organized ones. “

Author David Freeman's starting point for investigating how mess can benefit us in our daily lives began when he came across a physicist studying the ways adding randomness to a physical system like electrical circuits makes them work better, which seems counterintuitive at first glance. It ended up kicking up a field in Science called Stochastic Resonance.

Stochastic Resonance generates approximately 10,000 papers a year stating how randomness is everywhere...in nature and in our own brains. Mr. Freedman figured that if it works everywhere, how can this be applied to daily life, our homes, our offices, our organizations, our society. When he started looking into it he found some really bad thinking and accounting about how to figure out whether organization and neatness pays off. He found messiness and disorganization to a certain extent in many cases does pay off.