Chapter 1 : Part 3

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 3 of 5)

One could imagine unusual situations where a color scheme might save several minutes at a shot, as, for example, if there were a need to find the only green coded file in a vast sea of red-coded files, or if the entire population of yellow-coded files had to be pulled. But since most filing work involves not just looking at file labels but examining the contents of files, doing things with the contents of files, walking to and from filing cabinets, and creating new files, the time saved with colored labels will be just a tiny portion of the total filing work. This will come as a relief to the roughly 8 percent of people who are color blind.

2. This advice seems meant to imply that you have saved yourself thirty-seven hours of work by clearing your desk. But if you have thirty-seven hours of unfinished work, and the work then gets filed, don't you end up with thirty-seven hours of unfinished work that is now hidden away in files instead of at hand on your desk? Plus, you've spent a chunk of time filing it, not to mention the time spent purchasing filing-solution products.

3. Other research indicates that 0 percent of people who don't bother printing labels for their files spend a single minute wrestling with jammed or stuck file labels.

Izsak says he can prove organizing pays off with a little demonstration he likes to throw into his presentations. In this demonstration he takes two decks of cards, one shuffled and one ordered by suit and rank, and gives each to a different person. He then calls out the names of four cards and has the two deck holders race to find the cards. Naturally, the person with the ordered deck always wins handily.

But who puts the neat deck in order? A little experimenting with people of modest card dexterity shows that on average it takes 140 seconds to order a deck, plus another 16 seconds to find four cards in the ordered deck for a total of 156 seconds; it takes about 35 seconds to find four cards in an unsorted deck. One could argue that you only have to order the deck once, and then you can find cards more quickly many times. But in that case, you also need to account for the time it takes to replace the four cards in an ordered deck, about 16 seconds - with cards, as with most things in life, it requires repeated effort to maintain order - compared to the fraction of a second it takes to stick four cards anywhere in an unordered deck. Thus, with a preordered deck, it takes 32 seconds to find and replace four cards, versus 36 seconds with a shuffled deck, giving the preordered deck a 4-second advantage. But since it requires 140 seconds to order the deck, taking that trouble wouldn't pay off unless you need to repeat the task at least thirty-five times, and you're meticulous about maintaining the deck's order between each attempt. In real life, decks tend to get shuffled sooner or later, requiring 140 seconds each time to restore order.

Indeed, organizers freely admit that ongoing maintenance is critical to being organized, and many concede that most clients they organize fail to stick with the program and lapse back into disorder. But that's okay - you just need to have the organizer come back every so often to get back on track. Rothschild tells of one client who had her come to her home twice a month for six years before Rothschild finally suggested that the relationship wasn't working out.

When asked how they determine whether a potential client is likely to get more out of organizing than she puts into it, professional organizers at the conference respond that they don't make that determination; they just provide clients with whatever help they're looking for. Aside from the fact that this answer leaves unexplained the need for all those deft marketing techniques aimed at hesitant clients, it seems surprising that professional organizers have no more rules about when it's appropriate to provide their services than do tattoo artists. Fewer rules, actually, since organizers happily work with children - some even specialize in it.

Perhaps this is why so many panelists and speakers at the conference address the apparently widespread problem of professional organizers harboring doubts about their value. "You yourself have to believe you're worth the price," one organizer says to a crowd, winning loud and grateful applause.

Mess Stress

Considering how little evidence the pros lay out to support the claim that being organized is worth the effort, the world seems to put a lot of energy into fretting about being messy. The determination to get more organized routinely shows up in lists of popular New Year's resolutions - NAPO didn't randomly pick January as Get Organized Month - suggesting that for many people, being more orderly feels nearly as important as getting healthy, having a satisfying career, being financially sound, and maintaining rewarding relationships.

There's plenty of anecdotal information to suggest that most people worry about neatness and organization. They feel they are too disorganized and messy, or seem so to significant others, or that their workplaces are dysfunctional with excessive messiness or disorderliness. Many of the people interviewed for this book have powerful childhood memories related to neatness or messiness. Among the most common: fear related to a parent's anger at the disturbing of a museum-like living room; contentment in being surrounded by a sea of toys; enchantment at the jammed, disorganized, mysterious trove in an attic or basement. (And that's not even going into the thicket of associations with toilet training and table manners.) You might think there's a clue there as to how to create a child-friendly home, but the holders of these memories, now parents themselves, confess to struggling to keep their homes pristine and their children's toys sorted and shelved, and are frustrated and anxious when they inevitably fall short. Meanwhile, coming home from workplaces closely defined by rules, processes, and hierarchies at which they bristle, they are annoyed at their children's failure to behave predictably.

The unpleasant feeling that each of us should be more organized, better organized, or differently organized seems nearly ubiquitous. And when people brush up against someone else's style of neatness and organization, they become irritated at even small mismatches, casting themselves as Oscar Madisons and Felix Ungers. Or even as Charles Mansons: A man in Neenah, Wisconsin, was so upset over his fourteen-year-old son's failure to keep the house neat that he shot the boy, paralyzing him from the neck down. And a twelve-year-old girl in New York City fatally stabbed her mother during an argument over the girl's messy bedroom.

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.