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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.
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
I respectfully disagree with you on this point. Some of the best mechanics I've seen have spare parts, dismantled vehicles, and toolboxes seemingly strewn about in a haphazard fashion. Yet they can diagnose and repair an issue inside 15 minutes. They even know how to bring a past-its-prime vehicle back from the dead.
On the other hand, the corporate meathead mechanics (who couldn't diagnose a flat tire without a computer telling them that it's flat) tend to keep incredibly clean shops. All their tools are put away neatly, old parts are never kept as spares, oil is cleaned up as soon as its spilled, and all the new parts are safely warehoused in their original boxes. Very neat and tidy, but utterly useless to the customer. Especially when it takes then three and a half hours to put a new battery in a vehicle.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
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.
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---