Pilers Ascendant
Attention, filers and Boblings: “Order can be profane and life-diminishing.” So sayeth Rabbi Irwin Kula as quoted in a recent NYTimes article on the benefits of messiness. From the article,
Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat “office landscapes”) and that messy closet owners are probably better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts. It’s a movement that confirms what you have known, deep down, all along: really neat people are not avatars of the good life; they are humorless and inflexible prigs, and have way too much time on their hands.
Granted the article concerns atoms more than bits, but pilers are pilers.
Also, example of poor stemming in search (I think): searching for “messy” on Flickr returns this picture of Messier Object 31, the Andromeda Galaxy. Death to Porter!
personally, I pile, and I just can’t seem to ever stop. I always end up about once a month going through my migrating mass of mail, bills, receipts, and now school papers that end up on my floor, desk or kitchen counter, always promising myself that next month I’ll actually organize everything upfront. i like the idea that i’m more creative or productive than people who don’t have my “bad habits” but i’m not sure that i’ll buy that claim. i tend to think that i simply have more of a problem “switching contexts” for lack of better catchphrase. that’s to say, i get focused on a problem and often ignore other things going on around me until that problem or curiosity has been resolved or satisfied. mail, email, presents, responsibilities, sometimes fall by the wayside until some burning question in my mind is answered. it’s a bizarre way of moving through the world, but it has served me well (and not so well at times) thus far. in any case, it has yet to provide me with a larger income or make me more productive as far as I can tell, or at least so says my bank account balance.
Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent book, Blink, is about the uncanny human ability to “thin-slice.” that is, people can take a very small amount of sensory data, compressed over a short period of time, and make a correct knee-jerk judgement.
According to a recent study these two groups are equally effective judges of how “responsible” you are:
-your good friends
-strangers who take a few minutes to look around your room
I am amused by the use of “Bobling” as a synonym for “filer.” It shows how effectively i was able to pretext for pedagogical purposes as a filer so i could make some points about the IO vs IR tradeoff that have been irrevocably implanted in your consciousness. I am probably more of a hybrid with filing and piling periodicity highly predictable by the academic calendar.
Take a look at the evidence yourself — a photo of my home office right after i finished two days of grading the 202 final exam.
http://flickr.com/photos/95075812@N00/329651796/
I think the world is doing people with neat desks unjustice. If I were to hire a creative person, I would rather entrust my money to someone with a desk that’s tidy to the extreme than to the stereotypical creativeguy with dead animals somewhere under those piles of paper.
Not because I would trust him more not to lose the money, but because people with clean desks are better at throwing things out and discriminating between relevant and useless – two skills that come in handy in the creative business.
bob, piler?!
bob, using multimedia metadata?
we should coin more terms from peoples names, and see if they come out of the woodwork to comment on our blog.
pilers can often get away with their mess because someone else has it together:
- i lost a battery for my camera, but the superefficient supply-chain provided me a new one within 2 days for $7
- my bank provides online banking documents that go back to the date i joined
btw, ken-ichi, i’ve purchased the book that the article mentions. excited to read about it. one of the tidbits that the Economist mentioned in its review of “A Perfect Mess” is that Marines, as a rule, do not plan too far in advance. putting too much up front energy may cause you to sink much-needed resources into items that turn out to be unimportant.