Are You Messy?

Keeping things in order comes naturally to many people. For the rest of us, this is baffling. I'm naturally an extremely messy person. Here is my desk at the end of a long week of work:

But here is part of our production floor, taken at the same time. Note the production area is organized, but my desk area in the background is....not.

How do you keep your studio clean when you personally are fighting towards entropy? One way most of the studio stays clean is that I have a limited amount of space I allow myself to work. The Red Tag area, (aka my Zone of Disarray) is the formal spot that items go when they aren't needed in their particular space. My own desk is not quite so straightforward to organize since my normal rule of "will you use this item in the next month?" means I would answer YES to everything that's sitting on my desk. Keeping all these items in some kind of order is a challenge for a naturally messy person. That's one reason 5S and other Lean Manufacturing tools are all about continuous improvement, not immediate perfection.