Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World

by Tim Harford

One of her favourite examples was the unromantic mess of Birmingham, the second-largest city in England. Birmingham is famous for making nothing in particular, yet over the years has been a hub for steam engines, pneumatic tyres, pen nibs, toys, jewellery, cars, chocolate, buckles, buttons, tanks, planes, banking and electrical engineering.

In contrast, thoroughly zoned neighbourhoods are unbalanced. They are too busy at certain times, deathly quiet at others; they are unable to support local shops and businesses. They encourage a dependency on cars, because people tend to work far from where they live. They reinforce social divisions, too: Jonathan Rothwell of the Brookings Institution has shown that by preventing the development of new affordable housing, zoning restrictions often amplify existing racial and social inequalities.

Borges shows us why trying to categorise the world is not as straightforward as we like to believe. Our categories can map to practical real-world cases or they can be neat and logical, but rarely both at once.

For some organisations, filing in triplicate may be unavoidable. For most of us, such a system is a colossal waste of time, space and energy. If you need to file physical documents, what about the following beautiful alternative, invented by Japanese economist Yukio Noguchi? Forget about categories. Instead, place each

incoming document in a large envelope. Write the envelope’s contents neatly on its edge and line them up on a bookshelf, their contents visible like the spines of books. Now the moment of genius: every time you use an envelope, place it back on the left of the shelf. Over time, recently used documents will shuffle themselves towards the left and never-used documents will accumulate on the right. Archiving is easy: every now and again, you remove the documents on the right. To find any document, simply ask yourself how recently you’ve seen it. It is a filing system that all but organises itself, and it has won many fans.

David Kirsh, a cognitive scientist at the University of California San Diego, studies the working styles of ‘neats’ and ‘scruffies’. For example, how do people orient themselves after arriving at the office or finishing a phone call? Kirsh finds that ‘neats’ orient themselves with todo lists and calendars, while ‘scruffies’ orient themselves using physical cues – the report that they were working on is lying on the desk, as is a letter that needs a reply, and receipts that must be submitted for expenses. A messy desk is full of such cues.* A tidy desk conveys no information at all and it must be bolstered with the prompt of a to-do list. Both systems can work, so we should hesitate before judging other people based on their messy desks.

The answer is that daily plans can’t adjust to unexpected events. Things come up: you catch a cold; you need to stay home for a plumber; a friend calls to say he’s visiting town unexpectedly. With a broad plan, or no plan, it’s easy to accommodate these obstacles and opportunities.

A plan that is too specific will soon lie in tatters. Daily plans are tidy, but life is messy.

Crazy as this might seem, there’s a long tradition of using courageous questions to get us out of our tidy conversational habits. One list of questions was made famous by the novelist Marcel Proust, including ‘What is your most treasured possession?’; ‘What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?’; ‘What is your favourite journey?’; and ‘How would you like to die?’ All of these questions beat ‘What do you do for a living?’

Real creativity, excitement and humanity lie in the messy parts of life, not the tidy ones.

Jared Diamond, author of The World Until Yesterday, makes much the same point about the hunter-gatherer societies he studied in New Guinea, who ‘consider young children to be autonomous individuals whose desires should not be thwarted, and who are allowed to play with dangerous objects such as sharp knives, hot pots, and fires’. Though plenty of these kids grow up with physical scars, argues Diamond, they are the opposite of being emotionally scarred. Their ‘emotional security, self-confidence, curiosity, and autonomy’ sets them apart from children brought up by cautious Westerners.

When we overprotect our children, denying them the opportunity to practise their own skills, learn to make wise and foolish choices, to experience pain and loss, and generally make an almighty mess, we believe we’re treating them with love – but we may also be limiting their scope to become fully human.

We’ve seen, again and again, that real creativity, excitement and humanity lie in the messy parts of life, not the tidy ones.