A PERFECT MESS  is my latest book, coauthored with Eric Abrahamson.  It's about why being messy and disordered isn't necessarily as bad a thing as everyone makes it out to be.  It explores, for example, why messy desks are highly efficient, how overly ordered managers hold businesses back, the psychology of disorder, the role of disorder in art and urban planning, and why moderately messy homes save time, are more inviting, and are even more healthful for children.  I've talked about the book on the Today show, CBS Sunday Morning, NPR's Talk of the Nation and Marketplace.  It has been a top-ten Los Angeles Times and Barnes & Noble.com bestseller, and is creating a stir internationally.  You can read more about the book here, and watch or listen to me in TV and radio clips, and see articles I've written about useful disorganization, here.

Here are excerpts from reviews and other articles:

"A meandering, engaging tour of beneficial mess and the systems and individuals reaping those benefits, like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose mess-for-success tips include never making a daily schedule....A fine time tipping over orthodoxies and poking fun at clutter busters and their ilk, and at the self-help tips they live or die by."
          --The New York Times

"An engaging polemic against the neat-police who hold so much sway over our lives....A godsend to anybody who has a cleanliness fanatic for a boss....[and] for anyone who is already finding it hard to keep a New Year's resolution about being tidier."
          --The Wall Street Journal

"If you have a tendency to be messy and have already broken your new year resolutions to be neater in future, it will certainly make you feel better about your natural inclinations....Trawls the furthest reaches of psychology, management studies, biology and physics to show why a bit of disorder is good for you."
          --The Economist

"A compelling and comical tour of humanity's guilt-ridden love affair with accidents, messes and randomness.  Wry, informal and occasionally brain-tickling....Combine the 'world-is-not-as-it-seems' mind-set of Freakonomics with the delicious celebration of popular culture found in Everything Bad is Good for You to get the cocktail-party-chatter-ready anecdotes of messiness leading to genius in A Perfect Mess."
          --Fast Company

"Whatever you do, stop obsessing over your letter-perfect filing system....Makes the case that Americans' obsession with neatness has got us so frazzled about the slightest clutter that we're needlessly draining time, money and emotion from our lives in the hapless pursuit of order."
          --Time

"The authors cite successful book and hardware stores with no rhyme or reason to the layout of merchandise, as well as inventors and scientists whose big breakthroughs came because of nonsystematic, improvisational experimenting. In one anecdote, Abrahamson and Freedman describe a worker who became so focused on getting organized that he lost sight of actually doing work."
          --Newsweek

"Good news! Organization is overrated....Thought-provoking, well-organized, badly needed."
          --The Los Angeles Times

"As with Freakonomics and Gladwell's books, the attempt is both thought-provoking and fun....For those whose eyes glaze over at management treatises, fortunately A Perfect Mess unleashes, rather pell-mell, a muddle of other examples ranging far beyond your cubicle -- freewheeling landscape design, electric shock therapy treatments, noisy cell phone signals, tangled traffic patterns, random urban planning, chaotic terrorist tactics and Surrealist art movements."
          --The San Francisco Chronicle

"An almost indecently fascinating book."
          --The (U.K.) Guardian

"This engaging and surprisingly well-ordered book shows convincingly that a little chaos is good for you....Covering topics ranging from why our minds are built around disorder and how science is revealing that a little disorder makes physical systems more productive, to the aesthetics of mess (Ulysses is "a mess in almost every way that a book can be a mess"), this is the perfect excuse to break that new year's resolution to keep your desk tidy."
          --The (U.K.) Guardian

"It's impossible not to be charmed by the ways in which A Perfect Mess exults in physical disorder."
          --The (London) Times Literary Supplement

"A treasure trove of stories and anecdotes about fascinating people who have made their mark in business, science, medicine, technology, urban planning, art and music in part by being what I'd call idiosyncratically organized. From Alexander Fleming's fabled accidental discovery of penicillin in his cluttered lab to J.S. Bach's little-known propensity for rampant improvisation, the book overflows with interesting details...."
          --Professional Organizer Harriet Schechter, The San Diego Union-Tribune

"A new 'It' book."
          --New York Magazine

"Written in the style of counterintuitive classics like The Tipping Point and Freakonomics, A Perfect Mess amounts to a big messy pile of evidence that in the grand scheme of things, the advantages of neatness are often outweighed by the costs....Citing case studies and entertaining anecdotes, the authors [show] that a slightly messy way of doing things is more flexible, efficient and likely to succeed in the real world than a tightly regimented one."
          --Forbes ("Forbes Life")

"As a devoted neatnik leading a scheduled and color-coded life, I expected to be annoyed by A Perfect Mess.  By the end of the book, I not only had new respect for the rewards of mess but also realized I could use a little more of it in my own life....Makes for a fun read full of unexpected surprises."
          --The Richmond Times-Dispatch

"A surprisingly entertaining book....Makes a compelling case for why cluttered spaces and systems are not only tolerable but actually preferable to hyper-organized ones....Sometimes snide and always counterintuitive, A Perfect Mess pulls no punches in its takedown of the professional organizing industry....Makes a potentially dull subject not just engaging but a sheer delight....An array of engaging anecdotes that reveal how messiness, not cleanliness, is next to godliness."
          --The Washington Times

"A cross between Blink and Getting Things Done....A great, provocative, counter-intuitive, and really enjoyable argument about the benefits of mess and the costs of organization."
          --800 CEO READ

"Eye-opening stories that challenge our obsession with an idealized version of home."
          --The Dallas Morning News

"Engaging and refreshing....A book that scores of 'messy' people will embrace....Recounts numerous examples wherein messiness yields more creativity, new discoveries, an element of surprise, superior multitasking ability, and the ability to respond more quickly to changing circumstances."
          --Library Journal

"Liberating us from the tyranny that is Martha Stewart-like color-coded perfectionism and tidiness...."
          --The Huffington Post

"Flying utterly in the face of conventional wisdom....Turns the world of organization on its head to examine how messy systems can be more effective than highly organized ones....The chronically messy will revel in the anecdotes."
          --Booklist

"The advice is good and the arguments intriguing, and the book will probably be widely cited by those who have always resented neatniks."
          --Publisher's Weekly

"Maybe your mother was wrong to make you clean up your room?....A Perfect Mess deflates the conventional wisdom that highly ordered systems are automatically better. They take us on a wild ride through 'the history of mess'....The bottom line of this highly engaging, often funny book is that most of us have brains that are wired to react most fruitfully to a certain degree of disorder—which explains why some of us react so badly to people like Martha Stewart."
          --Very Short List

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