Where is that article, anyway?
About two months ago I read a wonderful article about the benefits of clutter. It quoted a number of researchers who were reaching the conclusion that a cluttered desk, if not essential to creative thinking, was certainly not a hindrance to it, but instead a positive contribution. I wanted to quote it here ... but (how embarrassing) I wasn't able to find it. I was quite sure that I'd bookmarked it, but if I'd done so it should have shown up in one of my folders, or via one of the searches I ran for it. I thought that perhaps I'd copied the article, but it didn't appear in the folders where I save copied articles either. I was pretty sure that I hadn't printed it, but I checked in my files of recently printed articles as well, but still no luck. I tried Googling for it - first via a general search and then by running a site-specific search on the terms that I recall being the gist of the article on the three sites where I thought I'd found it. But though I found at least one related article, one additional article that was a very pleasant find, and some more more materials that I wasn't really expecting to find, I wasn't able to pinpoint that particular article.
I'd pretty much resigned myself to not finding it, even if that meant proving that rather than being a creative person who benefitted from clutter, I was really little more than a pack rat overtaken by too much paper. Yes, I was able to emphasize the basic idea, and maybe in a roundabout sort of way make a point. After all, the idea behind clutter was that simply knowing that the article is there, somewhere, whether in my bookmarks or on my shelves, was supposed to be enough to help me focus on the concept of that article. And that being the case, maybe simply knowing that it existed somewhere in cyberspace, even if all traces of my route to it had vanished, would also be sufficient to help me focus on the central idea of the article. It seemed to be the best I could hope for. But I still decided to give it one more try.
Go to: Well, at least on my shelves, or
Go to: Bye-bye Bookmarks