A fine mess.

Pick up your clothes! Straighten up your desk! Clean up your locked Almost from birth, the message is drilled into our heads: Messy, bad; neat, good. But what if that message is wrong? "In general, systems that are at least slightly messy tend to work better than systems that are very neat," says David Freedman, coauthor of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder. As if you needed more incentive not to clean up, Freedman explains some of the hidden benefits of mess.

Mess saves time. "If you're going to keep a really neat desk, you're going to be working on it all the time," Freedman says. Neat people can spend more than an hour a day just straightening up--instead of focusing on more important things.

Mess fuels creativity. "When you go hunting through piles, you rediscover things," Freedman explains. "It reminds you of things; it gives you new ideas." Albert Einstein was a genius--and a notorious slob.

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Mess is good for business. When you follow rigid schedules and highly ordered processes, Freedman says, "you lock out new opportunities; you lock out the chance ... for things to adapt to a very fast-changing, dynamic world."