I couldn’t believe my luck. I was reading a post the other day that said something wonderful. Something that put a smile on my face for the rest of the evening.
I am, by nature, a perfectionist. Fortunately for me, I learned a life lesson in my teens that allowing yourself to go too far down this road can have some very bad consequences for a person’s health and well-being. As a result, I went to quite some lengths over a long period of time to teach my mind that good enough is precisely that and perfection is (usually) unnecessary.
Now, although perfectionism still lingers in the background, it no longer dominates my life. That’s a much better place to be.
Ironically, this can sometimes mean that I fall away to the very opposite of perfection and one way this manifests is in being messy. Messy, that is, in certain situations. Probably the most obvious of these is my working environment, where I opt to not get too hung up about keeping things in order. For example, bits of paper are scattered here, there and everywhere. I’ll have a tidy up every now and then just so things don’t get out of hand, but ruthlessly organised it is not.
But an article I was reading the other day has removed any vestiges of guilt I might have been feeling about this. It turns out that for some of us working in a messy environment is not only OK it is positively helpful. Result!
The article makes reference to a study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, which says that a messy desk can be a boost to creativity. Apparently “Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights.” Whereas “Orderly environments, in contrast, encourage convention and playing it safe.”
So, if like me, you operate in a state of happy messiness there’s no need to feel bad about it. You can shrug off that urge to tidy up and get on with the joyous activity of creating.
