Man oh man, is January ever depressing!
After all the feasting and gifting and good feeling, from Thanksgiving straight through to New Year’s — then all of a sudden, Wham! You shoot out of the tunnel, and it’s over.
You’re putting away the decorations, or the menorahs and dreidels, back in their boxes for another year; and somehow, all the excitement goes back in the box with them.
You blink in the far-too-bright light of day, wondering what is going to make this week worth living.
It’s a massive emotional hangover, a real Monday morning of the soul: “Get up! Get up, you lazy bones, get out of bed and get to work! No job? Well, get to work finding one! And while you’re at it, nothing to eat but clear soup and kale, until you fit into your old work clothes again!”
Then, with all of this for a background, you’re going to make New Year’s Resolutions?
“I’ll never do that again!” I found myself saying.
“You’ll never do what?” asked my husband. “Drink too much champagne for New Year’s Eve? Sleep late? Dance to the ‘Time Warp’? What is it you’re never doing again?”
He sounded worried.
“You can still sleep late,” I reassured him. “I’m just never making an actual list of New Year’s resolutions, again. It’s too depressing!”
You already know all the usual suspects: “Spend less. Save more. Eat less. Exercise more. Oh, and while you’re up, get rid of the clutter.”
I’m skipping all that, this year. I can even give you a famous reason: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.”
It may or may not have been Albert Einstein who said that — Google isn’t sure — but either way, it’s still true: if you put the same stimuli into the box, you’re likely to get the same results out.
Or, to put it yet another way, if you want your life to change, you’ve got to change your life!
But don’t do it by neatening up.
As economist Tim Harford writes in his book, “Messy,” it can be crippling to both productivity and creativity if you make things too neat.
With stories from the worlds of business, mathematics, music, and more, Harford makes the case that getting too neat and tidy is actually a bad idea!
For example, the wildly informal, even wacky offices of advertising firm Chiat/Day were designed to foster creativity, with a giant mural of a red pair of lips, and chairs that intentionally wobbled and tilted; but in truth, far more innovation came out of the ugly, nondescript offices of MIT’s Building 20 — including radar technology; the first commercial atomic clock; early particle accelerators; one of the first video arcade games; Bose speakers; and DEC, the Digital Equipment Corporation.
What was the secret of Building 20s success?
Perhaps, as the ugly duckling of the MIT campus, it was that its inhabitants didn’t need work orders, they just took out walls or even a ceiling or two, if necessary for their experiments; its long corridors threw people from unrelated departments together; and “nobody complained when you nailed something to a door.”
Harford also makes the point that people with messy piles of paper on their desks actually tend to get more done, and faster, than people who spend their time filing.
This is the best possible news for me.
If only I’d known this in high school! “I sure wish I could neaten up, Mom, but it gets in the way of my efficiency.”
Finally, I’m going to take the advice of a Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist, Dave Barry.
Speaking to a convention of fellow writers, he told us to “Do things, so you can write about them.”
For example, Dave told us about the time Oscar Mayer called, asking if he would like to drive one of their 23-foot-long Wienermobiles.
He answered “Yes!” because “What middle-school boy could resist being picked up from school, in front of all his friends, in a giant Wienermobile?”
It certainly made for a terrific column, if not a lifetime of therapy.
I may not be offered anything like a Wienermobile — though you never know! — but I am capable of skipping resolutions, this year, and just saying “Yes” to things I ordinarily wouldn’t.
If they work out well, I’ll let you know. If they don’t — even better!
That way, it’s a win/win for both of us…and maybe even a Happy New Year.
