I may have just died and gone to my messy Heaven!

An e-newsletter from Creativity Coach Susan Fuller sent me to an article in Inc. magazine touting the virtues of being messy — er, I mean, being too darn brilliant and wildly entrepreneurial to live by the completely impractical advice doled out by get-organized gurus.

As someone who’s been downright depressed for never being able to keep a clean desk for more than a millisecond (THIS Herculean feat of forced clutter control broke records by lasting for two days!), an anarchical premise like this is DIVINE.

Here’s a sample snippet of the five-page counter-cultural blast:

 The business world–indeed, the whole world–is much too biased toward neatness and order and overlooks the benefits of at least a modest level of messiness and disorganization. In contradiction to a hundred years of personal productivity and management wisdom, being somewhat disordered can be quite smart. And this holds true not just for personal neatness and organization but for structuring companies and designing work processes. And it applies to offices and homes and even to science and art and the rest of society.

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.

If you’ve ever struggled with organization, or felt unworthy because you “prefer” sweeping, plain view, horizontal filing systems to those pristine hidden filing get-ups, check out the whole article. It’ll make you feel so much better about yourself (dare I say, SUPERIOR to neat freaks?), and it may change the way you look at your awesomely creative desk, home, and lifestyle for the rest of your life.

Ditch the stress, own your mess!

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Posted in Call in the Coach, Mood Boosters |

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Call in the Coach, Mood Boosters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.