Let me be frank - today's column is probably going to be pretty mediocre. In case your response is "So what's new?", I ought to explain: this time, I'm doing it deliberately. Partly, this may just be a petty rebellion against reading too many pop-psychology books promoting impossibly perfectionistic life-transformation goals. But there was another, more immediate cause - a recent news story about a team of management consultants forcing civil servants to stick black tape on their desks, marking out precisely where their computers, staplers, pens and packed lunches should go. Now, I'm as much of a neat-freak as the next anal retentive, but that pushed me over the edge and into the arms of imperfectionism, and the joys of doing things badly.

"I dare you to try to be 'average'," cognitive therapist David Burns writes in his bestseller Feeling Good. "Does the prospect seem blah and boring? Very well - I dare you to try it for just one day ... I predict two things will happen. First, you won't be particularly successful at being 'average'. Second, in spite of this, you will receive substantial satisfaction from what you do. More than usual." His point being that perfectionism isn't just a rather stressful way of being brilliant - the kind of trait you might secretly be proud of - but that, as study after study shows, it's a way of achieving less, as well as not enjoying the experience. "Try for 80%, 60% or 40%. Then see how much you enjoy the activity, and how productive you are."

You could extract a similar message from A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits Of Disorder, an almost indecently fascinating book by Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman. The costs of trying to maintain a highly ordered system often outweigh the benefits, they say. A messy desk, like Einstein's, can be "a highly effective prioritising and accessing system", since it will develop an emergent structure modelled on how your specific mind works, not some externally imposed schema. And did you know there's at least one firm that makes money out of adding background noise to mobile-phone conversations, because perfect silence fazes people? Turning to imperfect housekeeping, the authors make much of the discovery of penicillin (the ultimate, unanswerable argument against doing the washing-up). And they offer the following tip: "Making a bed when you get up ... is like tying a shoe after you've taken it off" - a statement that gets more philosophically profound, and more existentially troubling, the longer you reflect upon it.

There are signs that all this may be catching on - in a subversive approach to parenting (see imperfectparent.com), and in the work of the US design guru Dan Ho, whose book, Rescue From Domestic Perfection, rails against obsessive attempts to impose perfect order, and the underlying psychological tendencies they expose.

At this point, normally, I'd expend much effort trying to think of a funny ending, or a stylish summation of the foregoing paragraphs, but you know what? Screw it.

· oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com