Chapter 1 : Part 1

A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder - How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place
by Eric Abrahamson, Ph.D., M.Ph., David H. Freedman

Ever since Einstein's study of Brownian Motion, scientists have understood that a little disorder can actually make systems more effective. But most people still shun disorder-or suffer guilt over the mess they can't avoid. No longer!

With a spectacular array of true stories and case studies of the hidden benefits of mess, A Perfect Mess overturns the accepted wisdom that tight schedules, organization, neatness, and consistency are the keys to success. Drawing on examples from business, parenting, cooking, the war on terrorism, retail, and even the meteoric career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, coauthors Abrahmson and Freedman demonstrate that moderately messy systems use resources more efficiently, yield better solutions, and are harder to break than neat ones.

Applying this idea on scales both large (government, society) and small (desktops, garages), A Perfect Mess uncovers all the ways messiness can trump neatness, and will help you assess the right amount of disorder for any system. Whether it's your company's management plan or your hallway closet that bedevils you, this book will show you why to say yes to mess.

Chapter 1

If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk?

- Albert Einstein

Kathy Waddill is telling a standing-room-only house of several hundred rapt professionals, most of whom are taking notes on broad yellow lined pads sheathed in expensive and complex-looking leather binders, about the deep client discomfort they should be prepared to confront when setting up a first visit over the phone. "'I'm the worst you've ever seen,'" Waddill imitates, her voice husky with emotion before it breaks to a mortified whisper. "'I'm overwhelmed. I'm so embarrassed.'"

After making the appointment, don't call the client later on to confirm it, she cautions her audience, her martial voice back, because he may weaken and cancel. Just show up. Pens flutter in the audience, and many grunt in recognition of past tactical errors. When you're with the client, she continues, you'll be tempted to turn up the lights to get a good look, but resist the urge. It's often more useful and politic to turn the lights down or even off, to get a sense of how things really stand by contemplating them in the dark.

To hear of the delicacy with which these clients must be approached, you might imagine they are cloistered sufferers of disfigurement, exotic neurological tics, or tawdry, addictive passions. But actually they're just messy or at least believe themselves so. Waddill is a professional organizer, here in San Diego to address the annual conference of the National Association of Professional Organizers, or NAPO.

An entire industry of sorts has sprung up, quickly picking up steam over the past decade, to nurture the notion that if only we were more organized with our possessions, time, and resources, we could be more content and successful, and our companies and institutions could be more effective. Take into account the hundreds of books, the vast array of home- and office-organizing aids, the classes and seminars, the software, the television shows, the magazines, and the organizational consultants that all purvey some variation on the theme of straightening up, rearranging, acquiring highly effective habits, planning your day/week/life, restructuring organizations, and rigidly standardizing processes, and it's easy to see that neatness and order have become a multibillion-dollar business.

NAPO is the pointy tip of the organizing spear - these are people, after all, who do nothing but organize - and represents a high-growth business in its own right. Founded in 1985 with sixteen members, in 2005 NAPO boasted more than three thousand, up from fifteen hundred just eighteen months before. The conference has attracted 825 members, 275 of them for the first time. These figures and many more are effortlessly ticked off by NAPO president Barry Izsak, a pixieish fellow who blows into rooms at race walking speeds and is given to dramatic rushes of speech sprinkled with sarcastic asides. Izsak is a studied role model for the highly organized. Eschewing the standard convention uniform of Hawaiian shirt and khakis in favor of a neat brown suit, when interviewed he takes notes on his own responses, offers a document containing precomposed answers to a range of anticipated questions, and, eyeing his interviewer's flimsy, narrow, reporter's notebook with a wince, urges a replacement from an array of more sophisticated writing tools he keeps on hand, including a laptop computer and the sort of handsomely encased broad yellow lined pad that apparently is to the professional organizer what a utility belt is to Batman. But Izsak, a former operator of a pet-sitting service, admits that like many professional organizers he must still constantly fight disorganized tendencies in himself - and almost immediately demonstrates this by discovering, after much shuffling through binders, that he has misplaced his notes for the keynote speech he is about to deliver.

NAPO is not only getting larger, it is also growing in influence and cachet. Professional organizers used to migrate to the field disproportionately from the ranks of teachers, secretaries, and other relatively low-paying careers, notes Izsak. Now, he says, former lawyers and MBA-packing executives are as likely to be jumping in, with incomes for successful organizers climbing into six figures. But even if the average annual income for a NAPO member were only, say, $35,000, then NAPO organizers alone (not all organizers join) would be bringing in a combined $100 million a year. Their clients, of course, are spending much more than that to get organized, since a typical get organized treatment involves purchasing a number of ancillary organizational products and sometimes requires a complete makeover of a room or section of a home or office, in some cases all the way through heavy construction. The magnitude of these sorts of outlays has not been lost on office- and home product vendors such as Pendaflex, Smead, Rubbermaid, and Lillian Vernon, all of which are paying sponsors of the NAPO conference. NAPO has also been able to gain significant attention for Get Organized Month ( January), a recent upgrade of its successful Get Organized Week.

The NAPO conference is not what an outsider might expect. Most of the lectures, panels, and shoptalk aren't about organizing per se but, rather, about the marketing of organizing skills. The problem, it seems, is not that there aren't enough people in need of organizing. Quite the contrary. As one conference panelist puts it, "Way more people need our help than there are organizers on the planet to help them." Still, there are real challenges, including getting on potential clients' radar screens and convincing them to fork over anywhere from $200 for a bare-bones "assessment" up to thousands of dollars for a thorough organizational working over. But perhaps the biggest obstacle to signing clients - one that comes up prominently in almost all the conference speakers' spiels - is the deep shame that people feel over what they regard as their messy, disorganized homes, offices, and lives. That is, people are too ashamed to even let professional organizers know how big their disorganization problems are.

Fortunately, there's plenty of advice at the conference for getting the messy to suck it up and summon the professional help they desperately need. One panelist advises organizers to point out that not only is the potential client's future happiness and success on the line, but so are those of her children, who after all will take their parents' organizational habits, or lack thereof, as a model. Another warns organizers against turning up their noses at seemingly limited cries for help, such as the ever-popular "I want to reclaim my dining room table." When the organizer gets to the house and surveys the mess on the table, he will easily be able to link it to systemic problems that will require a larger organizing effort, inevitably including the coveted assignment of straightening out the garage.

Copyright © 2006 by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman

About the Author

Eric Abrahamson is the youngest-ever full professor of management at Columbia University's School of Business, and author of Change Without Pain.

David H. Freedman is the author of three previous books, and is a business and science journalist who has written for The Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, and Wired, among other publications.