Clean up

Long ago I read a book called "Zen and the art of Mortorcycle maintenance." I remember, I was excited about having a new bike and having picked up the book from my brother's collection, I eagerly delved into it. It was not a book about bikes but the way the characters related to the machines stuck to my mind.

When I took the picture of this man passionately cleaning his bi-cycle, the name of the book somehow popped into my mind. And at the same time, there was a rush of a lot of other memories. I could hear my father, giving me a piece of his mind about keeping my bike clean. He used say, "You should value things that you posses. You have to take care of them. That's the way they are going to stay with you."

Long after that I happened to read a book called Gemba Kaizen (by by Masaaki Imai) that introduced me to continuous improvement methods. Somewhere down the line I came upon 5S. The 3rd 'S' refers to Seiso (meaning systematic cleaning). Your workplace/workarea is clean and machines and tools that you use must be in order.

Now keeping everything in order is not an easy thing. Its benefits are obvious (though i have a couple of friends who have reached such a state of messiness that they have found it easier to refute any benefits and hence absolve themselves of any guilt of being messy). That brings me to a definition of "the perfect mess", a word i came upon in an article on Lifehack.org.

Your mess is perfect when it reaches the point at which, if you spent any more or any less time organizing, you would become inefficient.
Eric Abrahamson, co-author of "A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder"

Well sounds logical to me..