Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

by Tim Harford

Here’s one practical solution, from the great American choreographer Twyla Tharp. Over the past fifty years she has won countless awards while blurring genres and dancing to the music of everyone from Mozart to Billy Joel, and somehow has found the time to write three books. “You’ve got to be all things,” she says. “Why exclude? You have to be everything.”37 Tharp uses the no-nonsense approach of assigning a box to every project. Into the box she tosses notes, videos, theater programs, books, magazine cuttings, physical objects, and anything else that has been a source of inspiration. If she runs out of space, she gets a second box. And if she gets stuck, the answer is simple: begin an archaeological dig into one of her boxes. She writes: The box makes me feel connected to a project. It is my soil. I feel this even when I’ve back-burnered a project: I may have put the box away on a shelf, but I know it’s there. The project name on the box in bold black lettering is a constant reminder that I had an idea once and may come back to it very soon. Most important, though, the box means I never have to worry about forgetting. One of the biggest fears for a creative person is that some brilliant idea will get lost because you didn’t write it down and put it in a safe place. I don’t worry about that because I know where to find it. It’s all in the box.38