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Slobs Found To Be More Productive Than Neatniks
writertype writes "Are you a slob? Do you pile papers on top of folders on top of game boxes? Here's the thing that those anal neat people can't even conceive of: you're more productive than they are. That's the conclusion of "A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder," by Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman, a new book that argues neatness is overrated, costs money, wastes time and quashes creativity."
As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. In my experience, being a bit messy can improve productivity by shunting unimportant tasks away from your center of attention. For example, if I receive a bunch of fluff memos, they're going in the kill-file pile until I get around to reading them in detail. (Which may never happen.) But I haven't disposed of them yet, so I can still retrieve them if necessary.
:-P
The problem is that if you let the mess grow too large, it *WILL* impact your ability to operate efficiently. So every once in a while you need to do a house cleaning of your different paper stacks, your email, your desktop files, and whatever other info you use on a regular basis.
Which gets me to another point. It's not that the "slobs" aren't organized. In fact, they may have a very good organization system. It's just that they allow the system to be strained to the breaking point before reorganizing. For example, I might start with an email folder called "work". That's going to grow too large in short order. But when it does grow too large, then it becomes clear whether it makes more sense to reorganize around department or by project. So I organize around the most effective order until that order also breaks down.
My point is that order is a good thing. It merely comes in many forms.
On another note, I absolutely love the way GMail handles my email. Rather than moving things to different folders automatically (where I'll never even realize that new messages have arrived), its tagging and filtering system allows me to auto-tag emails from mailing lists, board members, fellow project workers, etc. So I can view it in my inbox, then archive it without having to worry that I'll never find it again. The result is that my GMail account has kept more organized than any other email account that I've ever used. Now if only I could get a time machine to obtain time to respond to the lower-priority stuff.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Slobs are more productive when there's only one person (the slob) working on something, when you start having more than one person working on a job then you'll probably find the tidy people start overtaking the slobs quite quickly.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
FTFA: "When you're disorganized, it's an expense you have no control over, the cost in lost productivity," Izsak said. "You're losing money if you're not organized."
As a veteran "messy" person I see the deep flaw in quotes about productivity losses due to disorganization. Neatness does not imply productive ease of access and mess does not imply disorganization. I know where things are on my mess of a desk. And every single time I waste time "organizing" it, I then waste time trying to find stuff.
For me, and for other messy-deskers, neatness is the antithetical to productivity.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
True personal clutter amounts to a chaotic system based on the mental patterns of the clutterer. There is a pattern in the chaos, but the initial state and the chaos function are in the mind of the creator, so while to any outside observer it just looks like a mess, to the creator it makes perfect sense.
In the places I've worked, people's desks' messiness has been quite proportionate to their tech knowledge and productivity. They have been the most skilled, most productive, and also often the most humble and nice. Yet usually they are the ones least appreciated by the bosses...
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
It sounds to me like someone is trying to justify their sloppiness.
Visit an organized, smoothly operating factory; everything is neat and clean. Go so a good mechanic; the shop is organized and neat. From personal experience I have yet to deal with a slob that is exceptionally productive.
This is yet another example of cause and effect getting mixed up. I tend to keep my work and living space neat. I have trouble focusing when things are too much of a mess. More importantly, if things are disorganized I end up wasting too much time trying to find what I need. However, when I get busy, when I'm under a tight deadline, I tend to leave things a mess. I have more important things to do than to worry about cleaning up.
If anything, a mess is counter-productive. Again, I submit an example from personal experience. My father tends to be very disorganized with his tools. His office and workshop are both a mess. Although he will always insist he can find anything he needs if no one disrupts his mess. But then he'll spend twice as long working on something because he can't find tool he needs. And I can't count the times he's spent ages looking for something buried under all his paperwork.
So it's not necessarily that slobs are more productive, but that these people are possibly too busy to clean up. The guy who's workspace is always excessively neat probably has too much free time on his hands. I certainly believe that, but it doesn't mean slobs are somehow more productive.
My wife once cleaned a bunch of my papers off my computer desk. It was the last time she ever did that. When I was unable to find some very important papers, we made an agreement that I would be in charge of keeping the computer room clean. Life has been bliss ever since.
I am a visual learner, I can "see" where I left a item and can find it quickly. Thus, my desk looks cluttered. But I know where everything is. So, it isn't messy, it just doesn't look organized according to someone else's definition. We are all individuals and it is a tad unfair to expect all of us to fit one mold for what is considered organized.
Bearded Dragon
In other words, and say it slowly with me, "Correlation does NOT equal causation."
About 3 months ago our boss tagged us to get our office and network lab spotless and to throw out all the "junk we don't need." So far I have found that in our need to be really clean we threw away at least $5000 worth of stuff that was needed for future projects. Has anyone eles had problems like this.
Neatness is antithesis of creativity. While Clutter yields (at times) unexpected serendipitous convergence of seemingly un-related items.
...ect ... there would be no way I could have seen the new pattern. It would have been impossible. But because I saw the two things together, and saw something I never realized before, I was able to create some new idea.
My mother was a neat freak. A place for everything, and everything in its place. She could never understand how I knew where everything was in my piles of messes. Nor could she understand how I saw patterns in the seemingly random piles of stuff.
The time it finally hit me, was when I was looking for one thing or another (I don't remember the specifics, this was 25-30 years ago), I saw two things together, which suddenly gave me a brilliant idea of combination.
Now, if everything was in its place
Its like that movie Working Girl where the Melanie Griffith's charactor describes putting two un-related items together to solve a problem. In that case it was a wedding and someone wanting to get into TV Station Ownership.
Creativity often requires the serendipity of a confluence of unrelated items.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
But there is a certain point at which the stench, impossibility of finding important items, and spousal/co-worker nagging will counter any increased productivity.
Woah there. Messy!=dirty. My place might look like a hurricane hit it, but I keep it clean.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I think the message isn't, "Messy is better!", but rather that what's most productive is if the neat people have neat environs and the messy people messy ones. I am a messy slob and am most productive in my cluttered workspace. If I was told from a boss that I had to clean my desk, that would stifle my productivity. But my coworker may be a guy who needs neat, clean, tidy spaces to be optimal. For him, if the boss told him that he had to have a cluttered desk, he'd be just as unproductive as I would if I had an organized one.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Empty desk, empty mind.
Touched By His Noodley Appendage.
I think there's a lot of confusion between "messy" and "disorganized".
When my desk is messy I'll have a coffee cup in a corner, some random scraps of paper, a router, a few network cables, a bag of combos, some twist ties... You get the idea. But it's organized messiness. I know where things are, I can find them, and I can work just fine.
TFA mentions some poor person who experienced an intervention...their friends cleaned things up for them. Now they can't find anything...nothing is where it belongs. It may now be a tidy room, but it is no longer organized - at least not in a way that is useful to the person living/working in that room.
I honestly think messy/tidy is largely irrelevant and simply a matter of personal taste. Organization is what is key - but not necessarily some kind of institutionally imposed organization. Not everyone works most efficiently in alphabetical order...some people work better with a different organization or layout. And as long as things are organized well for them it really doesn't matter how messy something looks.
"Once you're done using something, put it back where it came from (or where it is supposed to go) rather than just placing it wherever. You never have to actually set aside time to tidy up, since you're in a perpetual state of tidiness."
This is one of the myths that tidy people tend to believe. It looks like a truth on the face, as the statements are technically true, but you must remember that 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 5. If you spend one minute each time you put something away, you didn't save that time, you just hide the time you spent tidying up in other tasks.
My anecdote is about when my wife was a waitress. She would stop at all of her tables to find out if they needed anything, then go and get the stuff. This would seem to be the messy method, as she could have a dozen requests all just stuck up in her head. The waitresses that would take a request, and fulfill that request before getting another, simply could not keep up. They could only handle half as many tables, and then were constantly rushed on top of that. The point was to make as few trips as possible. This saves huge amounts of time. The principle does not change when your talking about little trips to your filing cabinet. You may gain other benefits from tidying up after every step, but it is not a time savings based on no cleaning time.
There is no less time organizing = more time working, that is a mis-interpretation of the idea.
The idea here is that a 'un-organized' person is not not un-organized. Instead this person's brain is able to keep much better tabs on where things are. Their memory serves as their reference base. Should they need something, they check their memory for its location, and knowing where it is, proceed to retrieve it. The aparant 'chaos' is not really a hindrance to a person who can literally sense where the things in his house are. There is no need to visually organize it, since visually organizing it would be an advantage to spot an item if you don't already know where it is. But since there people already know where the item is, visual organization never crosses their mind.
I'm not an 'authority' on this, but I feel comfortable speaking on it since 1.) I have ADD, and 2.) I can relate and understand this kind of multitasking the brain does in other people with ADD.
I hope that explains it better. =D
---FourChannel---
So, are you suggesting that the reason I don't care to play video games is that I'm an intelligent perfectionist? Interesting theory...
Here's a real life example to back this up. I can provide more of these if needed.
My filing system is a bit unorthodox, but it seems to work for me; maybe you'll find the same for yourself. I have a very well-organized area in my office, where I store archival copies of every document that enters the office, including paperwork and business cards. On my desk, I have a heap of documents that are relevant to whatever projects I am working on at the time and copies of all the business cards in my card file.
Last night, I was looking for the business card of a contact I haven't spoken to in several months. As per my filing system, I have two of her cards, one in my card file, neatly stored away on a shelf, readily accessable, the other sitting on my desk, under so many months of clutter.
I grabbed the card file, which is organized alphabetically, by last name, and began flipping through it; I flipped to the end and worked backward, as the name I was looking for began with a Y. It took me roughly 2 seconds to rotate my chair, 2 to reach for the box, 3 to grab it and open it, 1 to flip to the end of the file, about 7 to work backward until I began seeing last names beginning with W. I put the box back on the shelf after about 15 seconds, without finding the card.
I looked on my desk, lifting what seemed a random portion of the clutter on it, and found the card in about 3 seconds. After I called my contact, I looked through the card file again, to file the card from my desk so I would be able to find it again, only to behold the other copy, in the file, right where it was suppoed to be. What did I do? I put the card right back on my desk; right on top of the rest of the cultter.
In this case, and this seems typical, at least for me, I found what I was looking for on my cluttered desk in 1/5 of the time I spent looking for it (and not finding it) in the well-organized card file.
Once I'm no longer in need of immediate access to a document, the desk copy is shredded and disposed of (cross-cut and given to a friend of mine who breeds small animals for use as bedding). This acts to limit the clutter on my desk to relevant documents; if I come across something that shouldn't be on my desk, it is disposed of, there is a copy in archival storage, if I need it later.
None of my clients are bothered my how I keep my desk. In fact, several of them have tried (and kept) my filing system. Of them, a few have reported to me that they have spread the system to coworkers and a few of their clients.
What's important to remember is that documents can be damaged or accidentally disposed of on the desk. You're only more productive in a cluttered environment until you actually lose something to the clutter; thus the need for archival storage. Good, well-organized archival storage of everything in your clutter. Yes, it takes time, but the time it saves you when you accidentally shred the clutter-copy of a client's project detail along with the clutter-copy of a paid invoice more than makes up for the time it takes.
I'll give an analogy to tray and make it make sense to those who might still not get it. The archival storage is like a disk, the desk is the disk cache. The disk contains all the data in the system, the cache contains frequently or recently used data and data the caching engine thinks might be used soon. This speeds up file access by reducing the frequency of disk access and mitigates data loss by ensuring that data in the cache is also on the disk. If the cached copy of a file becomes corrupt or invalid or the space it occupies is needed for something else and it is deleted, the original copy on the disk is still there; if the clutter-copy of a document becomes damaged or lost or the space it occupies is needed for something else and it is disposed, the original copy in archive storage is still there.
Before you call the analogy broken because a disk can fail, take note that a filing cabinet can fail, as well. It's called fire.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
One can get a lot done when they don't have to deal with cleaning shit up. But there is a certain point at which the STENCH, impossibility of finding important items, and spousal/co-worker nagging will counter any increased productivity.
You're making the classic mistake of equating clutter and filth. Most people would call my workspace "messy". In point of fact, it's cluttered. There is nothing organic (except for a potted plant that is well-cared-for) in my work area that I do not consume/dispose-of daily (if not hourly). Nothing can decay or smell or decompose. The same holds true for my bedroom. Just because there is "stuff" (papers, books, electronic components, etc.) all over the place doesn't mean that things are "dirty". Now, you MIGHT be able to make a case about dust... but the simple fact is that I use things often enough that they don't really have a chance to get dusty.
Anyway, just a reminder to keep "cluttered" and "filthy" in two separate cubbyholes in your thought processes, as they are in fact different.
Neat freaks are that way because they find the mess to be disconcerting. They don't do it because it's useful, although they certainly claim that and probably get it as a side benefit, they do it because they just can't stand the mess. They would look at their messy desk and feel pained at its state, and want to remedy it.
The trouble is that it's not just theirs, any mess causes this. So when they walk by your messy desk which works just fine for you, they still feel bad about it. But because their feeling is not rational, they have to make up a reason (this is probably subconscious in most) to get you to clean it, such as telling you that organizing will help your productivity or whatever.
Absolutely.
:)
To add to this, I can't count the number of times where I've been at work in the evening/weekend, and some important piece of data (phone number, file name from some bizarre problem a week ago, you name it) was written down on a scrap of paper, and driving back home was NOT an option.
30 second phone call to the S.O., complete directions down to the colour of the paper, approximate size, location, what's on top of or underneath it, which side of the paper it's written on, what other scribbles are around it (my handwriting leaves a lot to be desired). Really freaks out my co-workers to hear a call like that
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I find that often the neater person throws away more stuff. This leads to two things:
1. their space stays more neat
2. they usually don't have important stuff unless it's current, so they pull the lazy 'tude and say "go to so and so, he keeps everything". In which case, messy pack rat person is either saving the day or is overworked because neat boy can't handle dealing with old stuff.
Now, there are obvious divisions of importance as perceived by the individual, but generally, I find what I say to be true.