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An Unscientific Study
I spent Sunday afternoon wrestling with a spreadsheet.
I don’t work on weekends a lot, but I wanted some uninterrupted peace and quiet – the kind I never get in the office, because of meetings and emails and Soren’s occasional air guitar solos to 80s power ballads – to work on the massive project of re-organizing the articles on Travels.com. It’s pretty fun because I’m a nerd like that, but man, it takes a lot of brainpower.
Anyone who has written for the site is familiar with the problems the site’s previous organizational structure had caused. I know, because you told me on the Travels forum: Where do articles about Kindles and iPods go? Does an article about Hawaiian beaches go in U.S. travel, or beach vacations? Believe me, I was listening, and took all your input into consideration, and I thank you.
After exerting said brainpower, I hit a wall. Did “Travel Advice” mean anything as a category? Did we want to organize the articles based on geography or theme (i.e. Hawaii or beaches), what would we do with the articles that only fit under one of those, like “Top Things to Do in Spain” or “Top 10 Beaches in the World”? Did “Casinos” and “Business Travel” belong in the same category? Did any of this make sense, like, at all?
To calm down I went to my favorite procrastinating website, Arts & Letters Daily, for a restorative reading break – and there found an eerily pertinent article from the New York Times, “How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect.” Apparently, our brains have evolved to identify patterns. When we get input that doesn’t have a pattern – a David Lynch film, or a John Cage composition – our brains kind of freak out, and look elsewhere to find one. Studies have shown that people exposed to the absurd will find patterns in their next task that a control group won’t find. In short: Reading nonsense makes you momentarily smarter.
So I went to my bookshelf, as I always do in times of trouble, and read Ionesco’s famously absurdist play “The Bald Soprano.” Then I went back to my spreadsheet. I can’t really say if it was the play or the hour-long break, but it was suddenly easier to see where categories fit together, and where they didn’t. “Casinos” and “Business Travel” were separate animals. “Travel Advice” needed to be qualified. It was magic.
The next time you’re stuck organizing a list or structuring an article, try reading Kafka or watching “Mulholland Drive.” Then get back to work and see if it makes a difference. I’d be interested to hear if your experience was the same as mine.
