There’s no shortage of advice about how to get organized. There’s a lot of emphasis in the productivity movement around cleaning up, creating “Zen–like” workspaces, and removing clutter. I admit that I prefer a clean workspace. I need some semblance of order in order to put my messy mind at rest. I organize when I begin a new project, or when I start the sense that my perceptions are overloaded with too much stimuli in my environment.
I was fascinated by this article describing an installation at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art called The Obliteration Room. In the experiment a room and its furniture were painted white, and over the course of a few weeks children were given multi-colored stickers to place anywhere in the room. The article describes what happens next:
Over the course of two weeks, the museum’s smallest visitors were given thousands upon thousands of colored dot stickers and were invited to collaborate in the transformation of the space, turning the house into a vibrantly mottled explosion of color.
In fact, the phrase that popped to mind is that it is was beautiful mess. This made me wonder whether our obsession with getting organized is actually, in some cases, interfering with our ability to seek serendipity in our creative process.
The creative process is often fueled by, as Steven Johnson calls it, “getting more parts on the table”. When we have a space in which we can be messy, get more parts on the table, and explore novel combinations, we often find serendipity striking us at the least expected moment.
So where is your obliteration room? Where is your space in which you have permission to get messy? Could you set aside a space for your team? Do you have one for yourself; a corner of your room, perhaps? Or maybe just a time at some point during your week in which you let yourself make a mess? After all, birth is messy.
via This is What Happens When You Give Thousands of Stickers to Thousands of Kids | Colossal.
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I looked at my desk after I read this and realised that I don’t need or even like a completely clean and organised space to work.
Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE “Zen–like” spaces but for me they are places of reflection. So, if my workspace is too “Zen–like, I will sit and think, not actually work.
My workspace is organised chaos – everything in it’s place but messily so. Piles of papers slightly askew, pens in a jumble and so on. If I get stuck writing or creating, I find neatening a pile or straightening a crooked desk caddy or some act of creating order, gets me back on track.
So there are moments when everything is in perfectly order – when I’ve been working! It gets messy again though …
I looked at my desk after I read this and realised that I don’t need or even like a completely clean and organised space to work.
Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE “Zen–like” spaces but for me they are places of reflection. So, if my workspace is too “Zen–like, I will sit and think, not actually work.
My workspace is organised chaos – everything in it’s place but messily so. Piles of papers slightly askew, pens in a jumble and so on. If I get stuck writing or creating, I find neatening a pile or straightening a crooked desk caddy or some act of creating order, gets me back on track.
So there are moments when everything is in perfectly order – when I’ve been working! It gets messy again though …
Great post, Todd. The piano looks fantastic!
I try to keep a clean workspace, but where I let the chaos run free is on big post-it sheets I stick on the walls. One of the sheets might just have one sentence that I can’t get out of my head, like, “There is no wall.” Another one might have more of a brainstorming exercise on it, where I’m working on a project and all the elements are scattered all over the sheet.
This setup seems to provide both the organization and free form environment that I need to do good thinking.
I am looking for some one with the same name as yours who’s mom’s name is Barbara if get this and it happens to be you I would say you where probably born in 1976 my name is
Jessica Blanke and you can find me on facebook I live in utah
I call it creative frenzy, LOL.. once that ball starts rolling along it’s hard to stop creating!