Neat Vs. Messy

March 5, 2010

Interview with David H. Freedman, co-author of the book 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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Mike Carruthers:
Neatness is the standard in our culture. Messy people should be neater but you seldom hear the call for neat people to be messier, however…

David H. Freedman:
In some ways you give up a lot when you have a neat, pristine place - there are real advantages to messiness and what works best is really having a balance between the two.

David Freedman, co-author of the book A Perfect Mess, says the idea of neatness is always good and messiness is always bad - is nuts.

Neat and very organized people tend to be extremely judgmental and it's not just that they want to keep themselves neat and ordered, they have a lot of trouble with other people's messiness - and they're constantly trying to get messy people to clean up. And we as a society have bought into this notion and the thinking is always, "Well, there's something wrong with the messy person" and they have to change themselves to become neat. In fact we should be talking about compromise.

Neat people will be neat and messy people will be messy.

The thing that's the big problem is when a naturally messy person, for whom everything is working fine feels, for whatever reason, obligated to try to be neat and more ordered. That's the real problematic situation and that in fact is the situation most of us find ourselves in.

Trying to get a messy person to permanently change is fruitless and, Dave says, it will only cause tension.

And studies back that idea up that you can't really change your level of messiness in any permanent way.