Chapter 1 : Part 2

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

(Page 2 of 5)

The names that organizers give to their companies, speeches, and services - "Chaos to Calm," "Oh, So Organized!," "Realizing Dreams through Organization and Productivity," and so forth - suggest the transformative, if not the miraculous. "We change people's lives," says Izsak. "You can write that down." But when it comes to the question of how organizers are actually supposed to go about effecting these changes, the drill tends to be surprisingly simplistic. Successful organizers all seem to operate on catchy variations of what boils down to this very basic advice: Throw out and give away a bunch of stuff. Put the rest on shelves. Set up a tightly scheduled calendar. Repeat.

Many organizers freely admit there isn't much more to organizing than that. Waddill, a big draw at the conference with her brash, intimate stage presence, featuring sarcastic mimicry of hapless clients, makes a sort of comedy routine of it. "The client has boxes piled up against the wall," she tells the audience, "and I say, 'A shelving unit gives you the same pile, but you can pull any box out when you need it.' They say, 'Oh, wow!' I say, 'Maybe there's so much paper on the floor because you don't have a wastepaper basket in here.' They think I'm the smartest person in the world. Sometimes it feels like shooting fish in a barrel. But that's why we get the big bucks." The audience laughs and nods enthusiastically, and the last two lines, delivered as a sly, conspiratorial stage whisper, leave Waddill awash in seismic ovation.

Clients seem to eat it up, too - enough to support some forty specialties within professional organizing. There are organizers at the conference who focus on organizing homes, others on offices, and some on organizing relationships. (As one organizer puts it, "People can be clutter, too.") There are Christian organizers here, organizers of the "chronically disorganized" (more on this later, but don't worry - you probably don't qualify), and a few who bill themselves as organizing "all aspects of life." One organizer presents a long talk on the ins and outs of disposing of old documents. (Don't flush them down a toilet where city workers might identify them; don't use them as lining for pet cages; and don't burn them in the sink - though an outdoor bonfire can be cathartic, as long as you poke through the ashes to make sure there are no big pieces left.) Linda Rothschild, an organizer to the rich and famous, is said to be routinely summoned to the estates of the likes of Julia Roberts. Rothschild looks the part, bringing a dash of hipness and glamour to a conference where they are in short supply. She was born to organize, she explains. By the time she was eight, she had cross-indexed her collection of 45 RPM records. "I get more done between 5:30 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. than most people get done in the whole day," she says, conceding that not having children helps in that regard. "We organizers are a group of recovering perfectionists," she adds.

Not easily found at the conference, though, is an answer to the basic question: what's the evidence that being neat and organized is worth the trouble? Not once, in dozens of conversations, speeches, and panel appearances, does an organizer broach the subject of costs versus benefits.

A few scattered comments vaguely address the benefits side. One organizer, for example, shares with her audience the goal she dangles in front of potential clients who are considering reorganizing their kitchen. "You should be able to cook a meal from one spot, without having to move around the kitchen a lot," she says. ( Just think of the calories you'll avoid burning.) Several organizers pronounce that the average person spends an hour a day looking for things. But no one seems to know where this figure came from. The claim does, however, appear in many variations in organizers' brochures and Web sites - executives spend an hour a day looking for papers in their office; parents spend an hour a day looking for items in the home; and so on. One organizer specializing in time management promises to reduce time-wasting problems like perfectionism - all you have to do is take his four-week course on time management.

Something a little more substantive comes from the ebullient Sharon Mann, who is not a professional organizer but rather a sort of spokesperson for Pendaflex, here at the conference to captain the filing-system company's exhibit booth. Sharon has achieved minor celebrity in the world of office organization by fronting the hundred-thousand-member "I Hate Filing Club" on the company's Web site. The site claims that eight minutes of organizing activity per day returns eight hours of time savings per month. Once you get past the somewhat transparent device of mixing per-day and per-month time frames, you end up with the less-impressive-sounding claim that you need to spend three hours per month to get back eight hours per month. Here are some of the ways the Web site advises investing those three hours:

1. Use colored labels on your files, and cut filing time in half.

2. Given that there are thirty-seven hours of unfinished work on the average desk at any one time, buy "filing solution" products and get the work off your desk.

3. Buy a quality label maker like Dymo's LabelWriter 330 Turbo to print your file labels, because 72 percent of people who print file labels end up wasting time wrestling with jammed or stuck labels in printers.

Let's take these in order:

1. Because whatever information a colored label might convey could also be conveyed with a word, the most time that a colored label could save you is whatever time you save by glancing at a color rather than reading a word, perhaps a half second for very slow readers. If you spend three hours a day filing, then saving a half second per label examined will save you one and a half hours, or half your time, only if you examine the labels of 10,800 files in those three hours-in other words, if you spend just about all your time examining file labels.

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.