File that under ‘M’ for messy

No time to sort all that paperwork? Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths have a solution that will come as a real surprise

In the early 1990s, Japanese economist Yukio Noguchi was overwhelmed by the effort of organising the papers that crossed his desk every day, so he did something drastic: he stopped trying. He began throwing every file, regardless of its contents or type, into the same box. Any time he pulled out a file to use it, he didn't even bother to put it back where he'd got it. He just put it back in the front of the box. And a strange thing happened - his life got easier.

We think of tidiness as a virtue, and mess as a vice, but the reality is there is a powerful argument in the other direction. In fact, better than an argument, even, a proof. And it comes, perhaps unexpectedly, from computer science, a discipline we think of as one of the tidiest of them all. The algorithms that computers use to manage their time and space turn out to be surprisingly useful in human lives.