Messy Desk

By Margot Carmichael Lester

Most people think it’s good to be organized.

But increasing numbers of business, spiritual and other experts are pointing out that there may be legitimate reasons to bless the mess. A survey by Ajilon, a division of Adecco Group—the largest human resource services company in the world—even found that people with messier offices actually make more money.

EARNINGS

“Only 11% of those earning $75,000 or more claim they are ‘neat freaks’,” says Bernadette Kenny, senior vice president of human resources at Adecco North America in Melville, NY. “Perhaps this is because they are in higher positions and are inundated with more work.

Or, perhaps those with smaller salaries are in more junior-level positions, where they need to comply with someone else’s standards and strive to make a good impression on managers.”

Or maybe there’s a bigger reason: Getting and staying organized takes time—time you could spend solving problems or making decisions.

“We don’t factor in the time it takes to be organized,” says Eric Abrahamson, co-author of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder and a professor of management at Columbia Business School. “Are those benefits commensurate with the time spent to get that way? That’s the downside of order. The value of time can be very high, and we don’t want to waste valuable time getting organized.”

And here’s another paradigm-shifting concept for you: Messiness can actually boost effectiveness.

EFFICIENCY

Economist Jim Smith, director of the Center for Business Forecasting at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise in Chapel Hill, NC, is known for his messy office. It’s populated with piles of papers and books and other resources. Yet when he was running the Bureau of Business Research at the University of Texas at Austin, he recalls, “My office and conference room were always quite tidy.”

Why? Smith explains: “I had two secretaries who kept me organized. We had hundreds of visitors from around the world [and] we wanted to leave an impression of our efficiency.”

While a neat office can create an air of efficiency, you might be surprised by the inefficiency behind the order.

“There’s a certain efficiency to certain kinds of mess,” Abrahamson asserts. “If you let 20 things pile up on a desk, you can do one trip and file everything. If you do it singly, it would take 20 trips. So it can make sense for mess to accumulate before you sort it.”

That’s how it works for Chip Partner, director of public relations for Roberts Communications Inc., a Rochester, NY-based advertising, marketing and public relations agency. Plus, he says, the piles of materials create another benefit.

“An upside to clutter is that it forces me to keep details in my head,” he explains. “My messy office prevents me from being file-dependent—not pretty to look at, but I think it keeps me on my toes. And, at the risk of annoying the office neatniks, I will say this: Some of us think it’s OK to worry more about keeping all the work moving and less about making sure all the papers are filed away at the end of the day.”

CREATIVITY

Being too ordered can also hamper creativity, explains New York-based Rabbi Irwin Kula, author of Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life. “We need to recapture a little bit of the fearlessness regarding being messy that we had in our childhoods,” he says. “We’re not going to be able to solve the problems of the world cleanly right now. We need messy solutions where truths from different positions will have to be integrated.

But we try to create order instead—and just look at the mess we’re creating doing that.”

This may explain why so many creative problem-solvers aren’t known for their tidiness. Albert Einstein, for instance, had a notoriously messy office, yet an extraordinarily ordered mind.

Eva Rosenberg, author of Small Business Taxes Made Easy and creator of TaxMama.com, is known for innovative solutions to clients’ tax challenges. “I am definitely creative,” she says. “One of my strongest skills is to be able to see a viable and simple solution to just about any problem anyone poses to me. People come to me with tax problems, and I find a legal solution that’s easy to implement and that they never would have considered.”

But she can’t quite solve the clutter conundrum. “Despite having two heavy-duty six-drawer lateral file cabinets, at least three full-size two-drawer lateral file cabinets, three desks with adequate drawer space, and a variety of other smaller file cabinets and rolling carts, there is no visible space anywhere,” she says of her Northridge, CA, office.

Contrast that with some neatniks: “Their desks are clean and their files are in order, but do they have a sense of vision? Are they able to execute on that vision?” asks David Kolbe, CEO of Kolbe Corp., a Phoenix-based personality assessment and coaching company. “Maybe they’re so rigid they can’t respond to changes in their environment. Or maybe their orderliness makes them intolerant of new and unusual ideas.”

THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY

The fact is, not everyone needs order. While some thrive in highly organized office environments, others require clutter to achieve the same level of productivity.

“Some people are by nature less organized, systematic and sequential,” Kolbe says. “We call these people ‘quick starts.’ Their talent is to be adaptive, to juggle many balls at once. Unburdened by the need to put everything in its place, they thrive on chaos. They are more interruptible, and they enjoy taking risks.”

That’s why it’s important to recognize that people have their own natural level of organization. “If one person is really structured and organized, let them have all the filing cabinets and flow charts they need,” Kolbe says. “Just don’t make the person in the next office think she’s got to do the same, because it might be a waste of her time and talents.”

And how can you tell if someone’s a lazy mess or a brilliant one? Easy, Kolbe says: “The main trait to look for in a ‘messy’ person is whether or not the individual gets done what needs to get done.”