No matter how much I pick up, clean and organize it seems as though a hurricane has hit our house throwing everything out of its place.The cause, Hurricane Eli. Okay, occasionally Hurricane Holly and Paul contribute but mostly Hurricane Eli. An example of this is when Eli will throw all his food on the floor and then tell us that there is a mess to clean up. We are trying to teach him to clean up but he has a long way to go. Paul gave me this article from Time Magazine a few months ago that gave me something to think about, especially since I have a newborn and toddler and I am very sleep deprived.
MESSY IS THE NEW NEAT
Thursday, Jan. 18, 2007 By Jeremy Caplan
Neatness is Overrated. Let those stacks of paper pile up on your desk. Don't worry about the laundry tossed in the corner. Let the icons clutter up your computer screen. And whatever you do, stop obsessing over your letter-perfect filing system. Bless your mess, says a new group of "mess-iahs" spreading the gospel of healthy disorganization.
"Moderately messy systems outperform extremely orderly systems," says Eric Abrahamson, Columbia University professor of management and co-author of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder (Little, Brown). Abrahamson, a scholar of organizational behavior who admits to being a bit of a mess, says the costs of maintaining order are often overlooked. He and co-author David Freedman make the case that Americans' obsession with neatness has got us so frazzled about the slightest clutter that we're needlessly draining time, money and emotion from our lives in the hapless pursuit of order. Don't spend two hours a day straightening up at home, the authors say. Devote that time instead to your family or creative endeavors or anything more enjoyable than getting on your knees with a Dustbuster. Making your home germ free may actually be harmful to tots. Decluttering it not only wastes time but also saps a home's sense of character.
Filing away loose office papers can be similarly counterproductive. There's a reason people tend to stack stuff on their desks: such intuitive organization can be effective. Not only are things often hard to find once secluded in a complex filing system, but they're also out of sight and therefore out of mind. Those with messy desks often stumble upon serendipitous connections between disparate documents. Don't believe there's a benefit? According to Abrahamson and Freedman, desk-paper mess helped Nobel-prizewinning scientist Earl Sutherland discover how hormones regulate cells.
Devotees of filing often interrupt their thought flow to stuff papers in folders, while pack rats just toss papers to the side for later. Procrastination like that can actually pay off. "Putting off undertaking almost any form of neatening or organizing will probably have some advantage," write Abrahamson and Freedman, "because it's much more efficient to organize a large set of things at one shot than it is to try to organize them in pieces as they come along."
The message at the heart of A Perfect Mess is not that neatness is by definition bad, but that a moderate amount of messiness isn't a terrible thing. For those obsessed with order, though, Abrahamson and Freedman have several suggestions:
MAKE PEACE WITH YOUR CLUTTER
Organizational gurus may reclaim shelf space by getting clients to trash their high school honors or sentimental icons, but aren't their homes losing a bit of personality and history? There's a reason Rachael Ray is gaining on Martha Stewart, Freedman says. People are naturally a little clumsy and messy, and try as we might to cultivate monastery-like sanctuaries, clutter creeps back. Accept that, and you'll stress less.
DON'T WASTE TIME ORGANIZING YOUR LAPTOP
Search tools can instantaneously locate anything from an e-mail message to a Word document, so why spend hours dragging things from one folder to another?
BE SLOPPIER WITH YOUR SCHEDULE
"If you keep a tight calendar and you're not a dentist or a hair stylist, try being looser and not packing as many things in," says Freedman. A less structured date book makes it easier to adapt to inevitable surprises and affords you freedom to just go with the flow.
FORGET FILING
If you organize your CD library alphabetically by artist, the collection will be randomly assorted with regard to style of music. If you structure it by date, it won't be sorted by artist. Whatever parameters you use for ordering means randomness for some other characteristic.
If your New Year's resolution was to straighten up, you still have time to reconsider. Your time, energy and money might be better spent on something else.
I don't fully subscribe to this theory,I have some obsessive compulsive tendencies, but it makes some really good points. Instead of obsessing and stressing out about neatness and orderliness (of course there is a need for some neatness and some orderliness), we should make spending time with our family and doing things that make us happy our priority because those are the things that really matter. Eli will only be this age once and I am going to try to cherish every moment instead of following behind him every second trying to clean up his messes.
