10/9/2007 - A Perfect Mess
A Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahamson - The Hidden Benefits of Disorder - How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place. This book will help you to assess what is the right amount of disorder for a given system, and how to apply these ideas in life. A Perfect Mess combines great expertise with stories from everyday life to provide a striking new view of how our world works. Ever since Einstein's study of Brownian Motion, scientists have understood that a little disorder actually makes systems more effective. But most people still shun disorder, or suffer guilt over the mess they create. Neatness is no longer a virtue in itself... the costs of being neat and well-organized frequently outweigh the benefits. A Perfect Mess is a book written for the general reader in comprehensible prose. The authors' thesis won't necessarily surprise readers. If you think about it, it's obvious enough that there must be some optimal level of order for every situation. But it's not so much the conclusion that matters here as the guided tour through the messy worlds of city planning and hardware stores and trombone tuning and so on: you'll almost certainly learn something along the way, and in the end you may feel a little better about letting the dishes pile up.
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