Don't be a neat freak: Why messiness is good for the soul

Ever feel the pressure to clean up your closet, your garage, your life? You're not alone. It seems to be everywhere, this idea that once you clean up your surroundings, your life will magically fall into place. And not only will your home look nicer, you may become a better person for it. But Tim Harford says we may be missing the point.

"The truth is life is actually pretty messy, getting things done is messy, being creative is messy. There are all kinds of things about the way we live that are just intrinsically messy and we don't help ourselves, we don't help anybody, by trying to tidy them up." - Tim Harford

Harford is an economist and columnist for The Financial Times. He has examined the effects of both physical and metaphorical mess in his book "Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our lives." He says the idea that order is always better than disorder is a message we've bought into as a society.  

Cleanliness is next to godliness

Tidiness can be useful but it's not always a virtue. "The Victorians used to say cleanliness is next to godliness. They would equate being clean with being holy."  

And in the 1980s, the 'broken window policing' theory became popular. It says that if a community allows small scale disorder, it could spiral into much more serious crime. For example, if a neighbourhood begins to exhibit signs of damage (ie a broken window), this can increase the fear in the community and encourage withdrawal of its citizens, which can then potentially allow for more serious crimes to take place.

"If you sort out graffiti and low level disorder and broken windows and you pick up the trash, then you will prevent murders… Now I've got nothing against tidying up...but I think we're wrong if we attribute too much, if we think this is actually going to make us better people because it just isn't."

Instead, Harford makes a case for why disorder can be good for our brains. The idea is that when conditions around us aren't perfect, we are forced to our creativity to solve problems, and perhaps come up with solutions that are even better than we could have imagined.

Keith Jarrett Story

An example Harford shares is a story about pianist Keith Jarrett.

In 1975 Jarret was invited to Köln, Germany to perform an improvisation piano concert. But when he arrived there was a mix-up with the piano and he was faced with having to perform in front of 1400 people at the Opera House on a very bad piano - it was out of tune, had sticky keys, and the pedals that weren't working. At first, he refused to perform, but then had pity on the show's organizers and agreed to play. However, he asked his producer to record the performance because he wanted to document what he expected to be a musical catastrophe. But instead, the unplayable piano forced Jarrett to play differently than he ever had before. The result is one of the greatest pieces of music in his genre and The Köln Concert  became the best-selling piano recording in history.

Marie Kondo and the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up

So what does Harford think of the tidying craze, most recently made popular by Marie Kondo. "You know I'm actually a fan of Marie Kondo..She's right about a lot of things. One of the things she's right about is, getting organized doesn't really help you.. Anyone who has read it knows it's not about tidying up. It's about throwing out all your stuff. It's about having far fewer possessions."

A messy desk will clean itself

"Writing this book has helped me understand why it is that my desk is sometimes messy and why that's ok. And it's not a character flaw. That's actually just what a desk looks like when you're using it."

Your desk will invariably get messy while you are using it. A method Harford suggests you can use to deal with the physical mess on your desk is to allow it to self-organize. If you keep your documents in a pile on your desk, the ones you are using will keep rising to the top. The papers you aren't using sink to the bottom. So every now and again, you can have a quick look through to double check you don't need anything near the bottom, and then just toss the bottom two-thirds into recycling.  In Harford's words "So relax about your desk."

Even Benjamin Franklin lamented his messiness

Harford also points to Benjamin Franklin, an extremely accomplished man, who was keen on improving himself, lamented  in his autobiography near the end of his life that he was not able to master the orderly desk.

""My scheme of Order gave me the most trouble...My faults in it vexed me so much, and I made so little progress in amendment, and had such frequent relapses, that I was almost ready to give up the attempt."

"I think there's something almost comical, that a man with the achievements of Benjamin Franklin, sitting there at the end of his life going, oh if only I had had a filing cabinet and some manilla folders, I'd have really got something done."

Tim Harford is an economist, journalist and broadcaster, host of BBC Radio 4's More or Less. Tim has spoken at TED, and is a visiting fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford.

Win a copy of Tim Harford's book

We're giving away a copy of  Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives.  If you'd like to be entered in the random draw, email us at [email protected] with "messy" in the subject line. Read the CBC's contest rules here.