Go Ahead, Make A Mess

Tweet

Let's take a simple example: the messy desk. Most of us have one, according to the survey, and if you think about it, it probably works quite well. Researchers who have taken the trouble to study desk neatness, like Microsoft senior researchers Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, generally find that messy desks do a good job of reflecting the way people work--and thus can be more productive than a neat desk. No wonder. To keep a desk free of clutter, you've got to get everything that comes across your desk filed away or else processed and shipped to someone else's desk. That may sound gloriously efficient, but it's really anything but. For one thing, it takes time to get everything promptly filed or processed, and that's time you could have spent making decisions or talking to customers. In other words, there's a cost to neatness, one that people tend to ignore. In addition, by trying to deal with everything on your desk, you're spending time with papers that could be safely ignored for a while--that's bad prioritization. And, of course, if you want to retrieve a document, you've got to hunt it down in filing cabinets that often seem to eat important papers.

With a messy desk, on the other hand, you'll end up with piles of clutter in which the more important, more urgent work naturally tends to end up close by and near the top, while the safely ignorable stuff gets buried near the back. You'll sometimes have to hunt through a pile to find a document, but you'll probably have a good idea where to look. That would explain why people who claim to have "very neat" desks in our survey report spending 36 percent more time looking for things than people who say they have "fairly messy" desks. Not only will work be at hand and be easier to find with a messy desk, and not only will you avoid the time cost of having to file and process, but you'll also get the special benefits of serendipity--that is, you'll occasionally stumble onto a useful document that if filed would have remained hidden forever and perhaps even make an inspired connection between two seemingly unrelated documents that end up together. (A National Institutes of Health scientist named Leon Heppel made such a connection while excavating through his spectacularly messy desk in the 1950s, and it led to a Nobel Prize for a colleague.) That may be why, according to a survey conducted by professional staffing firm Ajilon Office, office messiness tends to increase sharply with increased education, salary, and experience. Yet there are still many companies in the U.S., including General Motors and UPS, where you can get reprimanded for having a messy desk.

Earlier this year I sat in on a talk given by the celebrity get-organized guru Julie Morgenstern to a standing-room-only crowd of successful entrepreneurs. Morgenstern, a best-selling author, dispensed the sort of straightforward personal productivity advice that has made her a superstar of putting things in order. The audience frantically took notes like Ivy League hopefuls at an SAT prep course as she dispensed such nuggets of wisdom as: Don't check your e-mail in the morning because it distracts you from more important tasks; schedule a single slot of time each day for making and taking phone calls so they don't interrupt you the rest of the day; leave a half-hour early every day as a way of forcing yourself to focus on getting important tasks done before you leave.

Consider all forms of mess. Mix things up, deschedule, unplan, be inconsistent, pile up, blur categories, make noise, bounce around, get distracted, invite confusion.

That all has the ring of clever advice. But think about it. What will happen if you start ignoring genuinely critical e-mails that arrive first thing in the morning? And if cutting out the last half-hour of your day makes you more productive, why not cut out the last two hours and be really productive? And if businesspeople start restricting their phone work to one time slot, then won't all the people you call during your time slot either not be taking calls because it's not their phone time or else be on the phone to someone else? In fact, virtually all of the advice from get-organized gurus tends to fall apart on close inspection. But we're all so desperate to add order to our lives that we eat it up without questioning whether it really makes sense.

What applies to desks applies everywhere in business. And for a simple reason: When things are carefully arranged and kept in their "proper" time and place and done in precisely the "right" way every time, you lock out some highly useful qualities--such as improvisation, adaptability, and serendipity. And that's true whether you're talking about your desk, an organizational chart, corporate policies, approaches to design, or servicing customers. What's more, if you push for neatness and order, you're going to end up sinking a lot of time and effort into maintaining it. That's just physics: According to the basic laws of thermodynamics, every system wastes energy and leaves the universe a little more random, no matter how much that system accomplishes. Another way of stating this is that to get things done, you have to make a mess--and, in fact, the more you accomplish, the bigger the mess created around you will be. If you structure your world to be ultra neat and ordered, then you are either getting little done or you are expending large amounts of energy unnecessarily to stamp out messiness. Biologists have found that the brain is loaded with random "noise" and, in fact, depends on it. Astronomers, musicians, and electrical engineers have long known there are useful applications of disorder. And think about which political movements were proudly associated with achieving the highest levels of order, discipline, uniformity, and neatness.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5  NEXT 

Read more:

David H. Freedman

A Boston-based contributing editor, Freedman is the co-author of A Perfect Mess, which examines the useful role of disorder in daily life, business, and science. His other books include Corps Business: The 30 Management Principles of the U.S. Marines; At Large: The Strange Case of the World's Biggest Internet Invasion (co-authored with Charles C. Mann); and Brainmakers: How Scientists are Moving Beyond Computers to Create a Rival to the Human Brain.

Sign-up for our Leadership and Managing Newsletter

Email Address: