The Age-Old Debate between Mindfulness and Messiness

Why Marie Kondo only has half the truth about productivity and how to know which truth is yours

There’s a war going on between Marie Kondo devotees and those who criticise the ‘mindlessly mindful’ movement of tidying things up.

It appears as a battle between mindfulness and messiness. But underneath it is the age-old human war between two polarities that struggle to see truth in both.

Battle of the binaries

I once had a colleague whose desk was always perfectly clean. She would tackle one project at a time, giving each her total attention. Upon completion, the work would be meticulously packed up and put back in its rightful place.

Her now cleared shiny desk had room for a slow and careful choice of what to work on next. While her projects were always done with absolute precision, they would also take months. Deadlines delayed with projects blowing out to exorbitant ends.

Meanwhile, my office was notoriously chaotic. My desk was piled with projects to the point the wooden surface was not visible. My office walls were covered in graphic illustrations, new design concepts, and random literature I’d picked up all over the place.

A few plants hidden by the chaos were sometimes neglected, attracting friends to look after them as I focused on my creative output. We’d laugh about me being a poor plant daddy.

As ugly as it looked and as stressful as it sometimes felt, I loved working like this. I would randomly stumble across a file at just the right time — taking it as a synchronous prompt to get moving in a new direction.

Where my colleague focused on one project at a time, I pursued many. People criticise multitasking, when there’s a certain magic it can deliver.

Colleagues would come by to soak up the energy of my office. The pulsating colour was motivating. And yet despite my reputation around the office for being the messy one, I consistently met deadlines and delivered a higher volume of output than my colleagues.

My boss gave me a gift certificate, which I used to purchase Tim Harford’s awesome book, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives. It turned out my penchant for chaos was not just personal preference.

Research supports the power of messiness in sparking and sustaining innovation. It turns out there’s another side to the Marie-Kondo coin. (And yes, I re-gifted Messy to my neat colleague with a cute wink.)

‘Trying on’ the other side

It’s hard to live as a both-and person in an either-or world.

The battle between neat and messy is reflective of a deeper human issue. Our binary-loving brains struggle to hold that both approaches might contain truth.

There was time I attempted to clean up my office in response to the persistent pressure and judgement of colleagues. I even went so far as to reveal my desk’s entire timber surface.

Colleagues were shocked and momentarily impressed but I was miserable and unproductive. I sat passively at my desk not quite knowing what to do next. This whole “tidy things up” idea simply didn’t work for me. At least not at work.

My home is a different story. I love a coffee table full of books and inspiration, but I need my other living spaces to be clean and ordered. Order is important for me at home, as it is where I decompress.

In parts of my home I can appreciate Marie Kondo’s methods. For me it is less about her ideas being right versus wrong, and more about which parts of my life they work.

Mindfulness or messiness or mindful messiness?

Social media fuels crazes with a kind of modern religiosity that implies “one right way” of doing things. One must be fully vegan or fully progressive or, in this case, fully Marie Kondo. Half-way or both-and views are often seen with suspicion or disdain.

The Marie Kondo movement is framed as a form of mindfulness. Yet, for me, my messiness is totally mindful. And if a mindful movement like tidying things up is pursued as part of a craze, is it really mindful?

It’s hard to live as a both-and person in an either-or world, especially as a writer. There’s a culture in online writing that encourages polarising views to gain clicks and readers, rather than presenting a well-rounded both-and perspective.

This becomes a fun prompt for any topic of interest: How does your topic, passion, or interest look through a both-and lens? Or, How does it look when you try on the other side of an idea?

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