A Mess Sampler - Desks

Excerpted from
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

Industrial psychologist Andrew DuBrin at the Rochester Institute of Technology has noted, "Whenever you see a photo of a powerful person, the person always has a clean work area." He's right, of course. A Fortune 500 CEO or a U.S. senator posing in front of a desk surface obliterated by heaps of paper would risk being judged ineffective and undisciplined. If nothing else, the failure to keep a neat desk suggests vague, non-leadership-compatible issues of character, in much the same way that divorce did until about the 1970s.

To be sure, CEOs and senators usually have assistants to help them keep their desks clear. Hut in the worlds of business and government, at least, it's not just people at the top who might feel pressured to maintain tidy desks. Organizational policy, written or unwritten, tends to be unfriendly to the cluttered desk. General Motors and United Parcel Service are among the many U.S. companies with formal "clean desk" policies; the New York Times is among those without one, but that wasn't much comfort to staffers said to have been frostily instructed by former executive editor Howell Raines on the proper technique for stacking books on their desks. (Horizontally, in his opinion.) Some organizations go ahead and proudly spell out policies on their Web sites in black-and-white so the public can appreciate the pride employees take in being told what to do with their desktops.

There's no way of knowing how many times messy desks have played a role in hampering careers. But some institutions are explicit about the price of messiness. Bradford, Pennsylvania, fired its police chief for not having a neat desk. Australia's postal service demoted an employee and fined her US$2,300 for refusing to remove from her desk a photograph of herself with friends-her fourth personal item, one more than the agency allows.

Fortunately for the world, Albert Einstein did not work for UPS or the city of Bradford. Einstein's desk at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, was maintained, by all personal and photographic accounts, in stupendous disarray. (Einstein makes a good role model here not simply because he is so widely accepted as having been highly effective at his job, but also because, as we'll soon see, Einstein might be regarded as a sort of godfather of the science of useful mess.)

In general, if one looks at organizations where people tend not to have neat-freak managers breathing down their necks-in other words, where they have a choice in the matter-people tend to have messy desks. Our survey backs this up, as do professional organizers. In particular, academia is an unrestrained haven of the messy work space, so much so that faculty at colleges and universities often behave as if they've been told their reputation will grow in direct proportion to the height of the piles on and around their desks. One Columbia University professor's office has gradually become so densely packed with towers of papers and books that the school finally assigned him a second office so that students could meet with him in relative comfort and safety. When Nobel laureate and University of Chicago economics professor Robert Fogel found his desk becoming massively piled, he simply installed a second desk behind him that now competes in towering clutter with the first. His colleague at the school, chemist Stephen Berry, a recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant" award, works among a landscape of eighteen-inch-high piles that have harbored individual documents for as long as two decades.

Well, perhaps messy desks are the stuff of cranky genius. Maybe these folks would have been even more productive if they had followed conventional get-organized wisdom and sought out the promised time-saving efficiency and functionality of neat desks. Except when people study working efficiency-as did, for example, husband-and-wife Microsoft senior researchers Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, authors of The Myth of the Paperless Office - they tend to find that messy desks can offer extremely functional environments. Academic types defending the practices of academic types? Actually, it doesn't take a genius to figure out why it makes perfect sense to keep a messy desk.

First, there's the cost of maintaining a neat desk. To keep a desk surface free of papers, except perhaps for small "in" and "out" piles, you have to get most incoming documents either filed away, thrown out, or handed off to someone else. (Let's assume you're not just shuffling them off into other piles on your floor or in your closet, since that would hardly be getting organized.) You can stick them into files in a filing cabinet, which would look pretty neat. But it takes time to read through and appropriately file each document if you want to be able to access it when you need it and if you want to be able to keep track of which documents are associated with what incomplete tasks and what sorts of deadlines.

In addition, you'll spend time each day searching through files, struggling in some cases to figure out where you filed a document and which documents need immediate attention. (We'll be talking later on about the difficulties that filing systems can cause in retrieving documents, but here's a quick example: if you have a higher-priority item and a lower-priority item relating to, say, the same client, should you file them together in a single client folder or separately in more-urgent and less-urgent folders?) If and when you find the right documents, you'll pull them out and shuffle them back onto your desk so you can work with them and then later will refile them. How much time you spend on your filing and retrieving each day will vary wildly with work complexity and the volume and types of documents you receive, but whatever it amounts to, it's time you'll be taking away from your real work.

Or you could follow the advice of many professional organizers and adhere to a "one-touch" policy for documents: whatever task is associated with the document, do it right away, so you can file it and forget it, chuck it, or pass it along. It certainly sounds like a good idea to go ahead and get the work done as it comes in, since you have to get it done sooner or later anyway. Except, of course, that you really don't have to get all the work that comes to your desk done, a lot of it will eventually prove safely ignorable. What's more, some of it will be of much higher priority than the rest. But under a strict one-touch system, you'll find yourself spending time dealing with office-supply forms and seminar flyers, even when that career-making-or-breaking report to the managers is due in three days. Of course, you don't necessarily have to be rigid about the one-touch system. Surely it's no problem if you take some of the less important documents and place them at a comer of your desk until the report is done. And even though that other document is pretty important, you don't have to deal with it right this second and interrupt your thoughts, so you just slide it over there and ... uh-oh.