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  • Messy

  • By: Tim Harford
  • Narrated by: Roger Davis
  • Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (301 ratings)
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Messy cover art

Messy

By: Tim Harford
Narrated by: Roger Davis
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Summary

The urge to be tidy seems to be rooted deep in the human psyche. Many of us feel threatened by anything that is vague, unplanned, scattered around or hard to describe. We find comfort in having a script to rely on, a system to follow, in being able to categorise and file away. We all benefit from tidy organisation - up to a point.

A large library needs a reference system. Global trade needs the shipping container. Scientific collaboration needs measurement units. But the forces of tidiness have marched too far.

Corporate middle managers and government bureaucrats have long tended to insist that everything must have a label, a number and a logical place in a logical system. Now that they are armed with computers and serial numbers, there is little to hold this tidy-mindedness in check. It's even spilling into our personal lives, as we corral our children into sanitised play areas or entrust our quest for love to the soulless algorithms of dating websites.

Order is imposed when chaos would be more productive. Or if not chaos, then...messiness. The trouble with tidiness is that in excess, it becomes rigid, fragile and sterile.

In Messy, Tim Harford reveals how qualities we value more than ever - responsiveness, resilience and creativity - simply cannot be disentangled from the messy soil that produces them. This, then, is an audiobook about the benefits of being messy: messy in our private lives; messy in the office, with piles of paper on the desk and unread spreadsheets; messy in the recording studio, in the laboratory or in preparing for an important presentation; and messy in our approaches to business, politics and economics, leaving things vague, diverse and uncomfortably made up on the spot.

It's time to rediscover the benefits of a little mess.

©2016 Tim Harford (P)2016 Little Brown

What listeners say about Messy

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Great book.....lose the terrible accents

What made the experience of listening to Messy the most enjoyable?

Excellent leftfield ideas and content as ever from Tim Harford. A book to throw on your bosses desk when he tells you to tidy yours !

Any additional comments?

Narration ruined by the terrible accents used to highlight quoted sections. For non-fiction works it really isn't needed and detracts from the content and the message.

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4 people found this helpful

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Messy

The American accents were a bit annoying. It was an interesting book though. Tim Harford is great.

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3 people found this helpful

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Fascinating Insight

As to be expected from Tim Harford this is a well researched book full of great insights into the value of a bit of healthy chaos. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on unintended targets and the value of ambiguity and small "Swat team" regulatory assessment.

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1 person found this helpful

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Down with the clean desk policy!

excellent book with a wide range of topics from desk, offices, buildings, education and playgrounds. Well read too.

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A mind opening listen

By its very nature somewhat contrarian, well argued and compelling. Certainly well worth engaging with .

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Nothing new I'm afraid

Well performed however there is nothing new in this that I haven't read elsewhere and done better

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Brilliantly messy

This has been a joy to listen to. As an octogenarian who has lived and worked in so many different communities from the Australian outback to large metropolitan institutions I so agree with Tim when he talks about the over controlling of our so called civilised society for the sake of ‘uniformity’. My heart bleeds for the younger generations who have so much talent and are so frustrated by the present administration of life activities. Soft play areas? When are children going to learn to look after themselves and become full human beings. Keep talking Tim and I so hope that we all hear you.

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Disappointing

Tim Harford is brilliant on BBC R4 but sadly this is little more than a series of admittedly interesting tales linked by the theme of being messy works if you’re disciplined enough to take the risk of embracing being messy in the first place. I was hoping for a more unifying, and stronger conclusion.

It’s also plagued, as are so many audible recordings these days it seems, by a reader who can’t do accents. Make them accurate or don’t bother. Ideally get Tim Harford himself to reread it with no accents if necessary.

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A great read (listen)!

Tim Harford writes engagingly about how "life is messy" and how sometimes our attempts to impose order or tidiness may feel like the right thing to do, but can actually reduce our resilience or creativeness. How the natural world embraces messiness, how innovative companies and institutions have wrought great inventions and ideas out of messy, variable environments and how organising your email into folders is actually less efficient than just having a cluttered inbox!
A superb read with no dull moments, and an informative and educational book.

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Messy review

Loved the book, and although I liked most of the narration, not sure about the accents for particular characters, didn't feel that it added anything.

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