Before you watch any more HGTV or Martha Stewart; before you buy that next issue of Real Simple; before spending (any more of) your money at the Container Store or Organized Living....Read this: A Perfect Mess, the book, or A Perfect Mess, the blog. They pull back the curtain on the organizational "industry" and look in-depth at the cost/benefit of putting forth the time and money to "get organized" when you might actually have less stress or increase profits if you just do what you know and quit worrying about if others think you're a mess. To put it very briefly, not to mention hitting a little close to home, "When people are anxious about their messy homes and offices or their disorganized schedules, it's often not because the messiness and disorder are causing problems, but because people simply assume (author's italics) they should be neater and more organized and feel bad that they aren't." The authors aren't talking about "chaos theory, complexity theory, networking, emergent behavior (?), self-organizing systems, distributed management, or any of the anti-centralized-control theories..." Rather, "mess for what it is -- a lack of order." This book is for everyone, whether or not you admit to being a neat-freak, because as they put it "Being messy and disordered and disorganized, as we mean it, is just what you probably think it is: scattering things, mixing things around, letting things pile up, doing things out of order, being inconsistent, winging it." In other words, everyone. Well, ok, everyone except you that is. I wouldn't dare presume otherwise.
"If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk?" -- Albert Einstein
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