Perfect disorder
Confronted by the disarray of my desk compared to the minimalistic surroundings of my office, I go on a journey to find out if mess has a place in tomorrow's world
WORDS: JOHN C SILCOX
PHOTOGRAPHY: SUN LEE
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication’ proclaimed one of Apple’s first product brochures back in 1977, highlighting a design philosophy that has shaped the American computer giant and helped it to become the ultimate technology trendsetter. Since then, the idea of ‘less is more’ has gradually permeated through society, finding apostles left, right and centre. To the point where today it’s impossible to miss the impact of this church of new-minimalism on nearly every area of our lives.
As I look out of the window at a new building along the street, it’s hard not to be seduced by seamless architecture: glass, concrete and metal combine to create an elegant and uniform geometric shape. On the pavement below, smartly dressed Londoners are going about their business, draped in fashionable monochrome cuts that are both simple and graphic. As they cross the road, they dodge between a few modern vehicles, boasting sharp lines and eye-catching angles without any frills.
‘Simple order is the future,’ I muse as I turn back to the office, but suddenly I’m snapped out of this daydream by the sight of my desk, sticking out like a sore thumb from the tidy and organised spaces of my co-workers. It’s basically one big pile of books, magazines and papers, scattered in every direction, precariously balanced around my computer monitor. Dozens of multicoloured Post-it notes are optimistically stuck in semi-strategic positions, reminding me of important meetings, deadlines and article ideas to explore. It’s plain to see this messy space doesn’t fit with the new order of things.
Maybe it’s time to bring my workspace into the 21st century? According to the bestselling Japanese author Marie Kondo, I could transform my life by following her KonMari method for simplifying, organising and storing things. In her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Kondo outlines a method based on a ‘once-cleaned, never messy again’ approach where, in no more than six months, I could rid my life of mess once and for all.
‘The question of what you want to own is actually the question of how you want to live your life,’ explains Kondo as she reveals her theory. ‘The best way to choose what to keep and what to throw away is to take each item in one’s hand and ask: “Does this spark joy?” If it does, keep it. If not, dispose of it. This is not only the simplest but also the most accurate yardstick by which to judge.’
“The best way to choose what to keep and what to throw away is to take each item in one’s hand and ask: Does this spark joy?”
This seems pretty straightforward, but attempting this method in front of esteemed colleagues feels slightly ridiculous. I make sure to mumble the phrase under my breath so not to be overheard – but I still get a few funny stares, as I pick up each object and prepare to send it away to a better life elsewhere. The other problem I find is that tackling mess by categories, as Kondo recommends, is a big issue when your job – journalism in this case – hinges on the widest variety of research possible. I seem to end up with thousands of groups all containing one element each – in other words, the same mess as before. My hopes of working in a Shinto-style shrine quickly evaporate.
This failure to organise my desk is further compounded when I transpose the problem of mess into my virtual world. Like most of my peers, I receive hundreds of emails a week, and trying to file every single one can be a job in itself. A study published after the 2004 Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction convention found that on average people create a new email folder every five days, which represents more than 700 each decade. No wonder that researchers at R&D company Xerox PARC in California found that approximately 10 per cent of all email time is spent organising email.
So is it worth it? Not according to Steve Whittaker and experts at IBM Research, who trash the idea in their aptly named publication Am I Wasting My Time Organising Email? By installing software on computers belonging to several hundreds of office workers and tracking 85,000 attempts to find email, the researchers discovered that people who relied on folders to find particular emails took longer to find what they were looking for than people who didn’t. They concluded that if you just leave your emails to stack up in the inbox, you will find them more quickly than in a tidy structure of folders.
It may come as a surprise but modern computers handle their memory systems in a similar fashion. Data is allowed to stack up in memory caches, which are small storage units that can be accessed quickly. But working out which data should be put in the fastest cache is a question that caused early computer scientists quite a few headaches. It’s a bit like trying to work out whether a piece of paper should be on your desk, in the drawer or stored in the basement archive.
A Hungarian called László Bélády finally cracked the case, proving that one of the fastest and most effective algorithms is to wait until the cache store is full before ejecting the data that hadn’t been used recently. This rule, called Least Recently Used, works because, in computing, the fact that you’ve recently needed to use something is often a good indication that you will need it again soon. It can be looked at like an old-fashioned pile of papers on a messy desk. Every time a document arrives or is consulted, it goes back on the top of the pile. Unused documents gradually settle at the bottom.
But back in the real world, does this theory stand up? Are there any other advantages to living with mess? Yes argues award-winning journalist, economist and broadcaster Tim Harford in his latest book Messy: The Power of Disorder To Transform our Lives. Through this comprehensive study of the value of disarray, Harford encourages readers to resist the urge to tidy, catalogue and arrange. Instead we should all embrace the fundamental messiness of our world.
Harford sums up his theory by recounting a story about the jazz musician Keith Jarrett, who turned up to play a concert at the Cologne opera house only to find that the piano was unplayable. The instrument was too small to fill the large space with its sound, and it was also out of tune, with a number of keys that were prone to sticking. After initially refusing to play, Jarrett finally agreed to perform, after feeling pity for the 17-year-old promoter who followed him out into the street, crying and begging him not to let down the 1400 spectators who were about to arrive. Luckily he did, as it turned out to be a career-defining moment: the recording of the concert has sold 3.5 million copies – no other solo jazz album or solo piano album has ever come close to it in terms of success.
‘When we see skilled performers succeeding in difficult circumstances, we habitually describe them as having triumphed over adversity, or despite the odds,’ says Harford. ‘But that’s not always the right perspective. Jarrett didn’t just produce a good concert in trying times. He produced the performance of a lifetime, but the shortcomings of the piano actually helped him.’
‘Keith Jarrett’s instinct was not to play, and it’s an instinct that most of us would share. We don’t want to work with bad tools, especially when the stakes are so high. But in hindsight, Jarrett’s instinct was wrong. What if our own similar instincts are also wrong, and in a much wider range of circumstances […] We often succumb to the tidy-minded approach when we would be better served by embracing a degree of mess.’
“We often succumb to the tidy-minded approach when we would be better served by embracing a degree of mess”
Such a logical argument is very persuasive, but let’s not pretend a similar situation would have worked out for everybody. If I was the one having to play an out-of-tune piano in front of a massive audience of keen jazz fans, I would bet that even my most heartfelt rendition of chopsticks would sound worse. Nevertheless, Harford argues that mess isn’t simply an ally for virtuosos, and uses the disruption caused to commuters by the 2014 London Underground strike as an example.
‘Most people used a different route to get to work on strike days, no doubt to some annoyance,’ he says. ‘But >> what was surprising was that when the strike was over, not everybody returned to their habitual commuting route. […] We tend to think that commuters have their route to work honed to perfection: evidently not. A substantial minority promptly found an improvement to the journey they had been making for years. All they needed was an unexpected shock to force them to seek out something better.’
In addition to music and the daily commute, Harford compiles a wide range of information and studies that indicate other areas where mess can actually improve our lives. He neatly organises them into nine different chapters that delve into the role of disarray in creativity, collaboration, workplaces, improvisation, winning, incentives, automation, resilience and life. Examples span politics to child’s play, computer sciences to art, healthcare to war as well as business and sport. And adepts include David Bowie, Martin Luther King, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Benjamin Franklin, among many others. Seemingly mess shouldn’t be ignored.
But does that mean all our attempts to tidy and arrange the world we live in are fruitless? Should we abandon order and simply live in absolute chaos? Well not exactly. Even Harford admits tidiness is human nature, and has an important place in our world. He explains: ‘Sometimes our desire for tidiness – our seemingly innate urge to create a world that is ordered, systemised, quantified, neatly structured into clear categories, planned, predictable – can be helpful. It wouldn’t be such a deeply rooted instinct if it weren’t helpful.’
So perhaps there is room for both mess and order to exist in the same world and we could all benefit from both states. This thought is echoed by Doctor Kathleen D Vohs of the University of Minnesota. ‘The human mind likes order, rules and tradition,’ she says. ‘Yet disorder, unruliness and unconventionality also hold appeal. In fact, both order and disorder are prevalent in nature and in culture. Order and disorder, therefore, might be functional, as they could activate different psychological states and benefit different kinds of outcomes.’
To see if this type of thinking had any legs, Vohs and her team devised three experiments, looking to prove the hypothesis that orderly environments lead people towards tradition and convention, whereas disorderly environments encourage breaking with tradition and convention – and how both settings can alter preferences, choices and behaviour. They invited more than 200 different students from different backgrounds to undertake a series of tasks in tidy and messy rooms. The students were asked to make choices concerning food and charitable donations, and set a creative business task.
The results contradicted prior work in this field that tended to characterise disorderly environments as being capable of producing wild, harmful or bad behaviour, and orderly environments as evoking honesty, interaction and goodness. In fact, things are much more nuanced, and the research demonstrated that disorderly environments seem to inspire a breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights. Orderly environments, in contrast, encourage convention and playing it safe.
“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”
‘Our systematic investigations revealed that both kinds of setting can enable people to harness the power of these environments to achieve their goals,’ concludes Vohs. But such a nuanced result doesn’t really help me make a clear-cut decision with my desk. Do I press on and rid it of disorder, or leave it alone, happy in its natural untidy state?
Finally I look to Apple for inspiration – fittingly, as it was the very company that provoked my questions in the first place. Steve Jobs, the founder of the company, was a vocal supporter of minimalism and design – famously demanding to see 10 different types of oxygen mask when in hospital fighting for his life against cancer. But strangely, if you look at photos of him a few years earlier sitting at his desk in his Palo Alto house, it is covered in a surprising amount of clutter.
If even Jobs couldn’t enforce the unstoppable march of minimalism on his desk, maybe it’s not worth me losing sleep over it. And he’s not the only famous person to have been plagued by disorder. When questioned about the mess of his personal space, Albert Einstein, the father of modern physics, once famously quipped: ‘If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?’