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    A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder ? How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-fly Planning Make the World a Better Place
    Unavailable
    A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder ? How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-fly Planning Make the World a Better Place
    Unavailable
    A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder ? How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-fly Planning Make the World a Better Place
    Audiobook (abridged)3 hours

    A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder ? How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-fly Planning Make the World a Better Place

    Written by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman

    Narrated by Scott Brick

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Ever since Einstein's study of Brownian Motion, scientists have understood that a little disorder can actually make systems more effective. Yet most people still shun disorder or suffer guilt over the mess they can't avoid.
    With a spectacular array of true stories and case studies of the hidden benefits of mess, A Perfect Mess overturns the accepted wisdom that tight schedules, organization, neatness, and consistency are the keys to success. Drawing on examples from business, parenting, cooking, the war on terrorism, retail, and even the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Abrahamson and Freedman demonstrate that moderately messy systems use resources more efficiently, yield better solutions, and are harder to break than neat ones.

    Applying this idea on scales both large (government, society) and small (desktops, garages), A Perfect Mess uncovers the ways messiness can trump neatness, and will help you assess the right amount of disorder for any system.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateJan 3, 2007
    ISBN9781594836169
    Unavailable
    A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder ? How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-fly Planning Make the World a Better Place

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    Reviews for A Perfect Mess

    3.5/5

    160 ratings13 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I really liked this one, more for some of the sparks it set off in my head than some of the actual content. This explores the phenomenon of professional Organisers and how they try to impose a rigid structure of order on people's lives. What isn't often explored in the quick TV show is the fact that a lot of these people find it almost impossible to maintain this order. Without some form of fludity in the choice many people find order a difficult prospect, and many find that it really doesn't quite work, both on a professional and personal level. Personally I'm in a bit too much of a mess but rigid order doesn't really work all that well for me either (yes I'm a librarian, yes some parts of my life are well-organised)While complete chaos isn't ideal, people in general are messy and systems have to reflect this. This is a look at humanising systems and instead of everyone being the same, that we all chose a system that works (and complete chaos doesn't tend to be a workable system) for us and that we all should allow for the fact that other people's mileage may vary.It does display a certain amount of bias towards a more chaotic feel but that's slightly refreshing (for me at least) in a sea of books about rigid order.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A string of interesting anecdotes, mostly on the theme that a little unstructured disorder fosters creativity and innovation. And then the book just stops, as though the authors had run out of things to say.
    • 3/5
      The first half of A Perfect Mess is charming and informative. At the midpoint, I dreaded picking it back up. Every one of my reader friends told me to skim it, but I slogged on. And what a slog it was. Someone else took over the helm at the midpoint, and A Perfect Mess became a doctoral thesis. I'm glad I did hang on until the end, however, because the final two chapters had quite a bit to say about creativity and "mess" that I found worth reading. It took me a month of picking it up and putting it back down to finish this one, and I believe i should have listened to my friends. I could have skimmed it.
    • 4/5
      I listened to this while (you've gotta love this) deep-cleaning and organizing my house. The author uses many of the same techniques to exlpain why a little mess is good for you that Malcolm Gladwell uses to explain why snap thinking is a good thing (See: Blink). State a thesis, throw in some facts, throw in some anecdotes, and throw in some interesting conjecture and you've got a book! Abrahamson doesn't have quite the finesse of Gladwell, but that still makes this an interesting read (or listen). It's really funny in some parts and makes me glad I have a little bit of a mess on my desk and in my home (I have a four year old, and to me, if you can't tell a child lives in a home where the child lives, you're doing something very wrong). However, while making statements about how the mind is evolutionarily set up to handle mess, he ignores the great stress that many people feel when confronted with the messiness of others. Maybe we can handle clutter well, but there is something to be said for laying out the outfit you're going to wear the next day or letting your employees know what is expected of them in the long term.On the whole, this book was entertaining and informative and certainly gives the reader a number of great excuses to NOT file, sort, arange, or organize. I think his editor may have taken this lesson too much to heart, though-it tends to hop around a lot and many of the stories are very non sequiter.
    • 4/5
      A real eye opener. When is the last time someone defended being messy? Such a wake up call for a culture obsessed with organizing shows, magazines, stores! The author backs up his claims with studies and statistics but more importantly raises the point that maybe your messy desk works just fine even if it doesn't look like a picture from the Container Store catalog.
    • 5/5
      Not a bad book but I like order instead of disorder. A few ideas are good and I will modify some departments.
    • 5/5
      The book is inspirational and insightful. Thank you! Looking forward hearing more.
    • 2/5
      The concept is really good - what’s the cost to organize and how to you determine which organizational activities to engage in and which to skip. Unfortunately, it seemed more of a biased editorial shaming planning. I would have loved more studies about what to do and when to do it and how to improve myself rather than studies saying people who plan are wasting time.

      Too much what they are telling you is wrong.
      Not enough here’s what to do and why.
    • 4/5
      interesting book. great examples. the recording was problematic though. kept skipping....
    • 3/5
      Audiobook narrated by Scott Brick. I didn't think this was the right voice for this book, but in any case my brand of messiness has been validated! What I got out of it: messiness is flexible; it reflects the organizational structures of individual minds; constant organizing and cleaning can be inefficient; messiness can lead to creative breakthroughs and discoveries.
    • 4/5
      At first, I didn't think I was going to like this book. The author seemed to be reaching with a lot of his examples of the advantages of disorder. But over time, the examples mounted and he shifted his focus on finding a balance or order to disorder. I really enjoyed his analysis and I appreciated that this book made me think outside the box.
    • 1/5
      Couldn't finish it (made it to page 84). I was looking forward to some good argumentative discourse but this book really let me down. While I do believe that sometimes the cost of organising something is much greater than what you get in return, the way the authors try to prove their point leaves the impression of deceit.
      They use quirky anecdotes for proof that messy systems sometimes work only to constantly repeat that it's better to be somewhere in the middle.
      The anecdotes aren't the annoying part, the argumentation and classification is. The way they "scientifically" try to differentiate mess from chaos is this: they won't use chaos because chaos, in modern sciences as chaos theory, implies that there's a hidden order; this differs from the common utilisation of the word chaos by us common people, so they thought they'll use mess as expressing exactly what common people understand by mess... Why not use chaos then if you'll go with what most people understand by it? Maybe because 'mess' is mild in comparison to 'chaos' thus making their point of view easier to agree with.
    • 2/5
      A book of case studies, from homes to business organizations, arguing that “mess” is not inherently bad and in many cases is actually beneficial. The authors’ point is very valid; American ideals of “neat” and “organized” do tend to be at levels that take far more time to maintain than they give back in efficiency. But after a while I found the book’s evangelization annoying. The authors do acknowledge that there are particular situations where neatness indeed pays off, and levels of messiness that do indeed reach the pathological; however, it reads more like a token “yeah, a sloppy operating room is bad” than a real acknowledgement that there is still such thing as inappropriately messy. (As for the final section on smells, I invite them to ride around in my ex’s car on a hot day sometime.)

      My chief disagreement with the book (and it’s possible that they do address this and I overlooked it) is that the authors don’t address situations where your individual messiness affects other people — not aesthetically (the authors make it quite clear that they’re on the side of “none of your business what someone else’s desk/yard/business plan looks like”), but functionally or financially. Asking “Does this level of mess help or harm my overall functioning?” is a necessary question, but so is “Does this level of mess help or harm the functioning of people who I have obligations toward — my spouse, my family, my coworkers?”