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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."
time being spent on the upkeep of said neatness:
"People who are really, really neat, between what it takes to be really neat at the office and at home, typically will spend anywhere from an hour to four hours a day just organizing and neatening," he said.
Why not automate your neatness instead? I am a very messy person, which is actually one reason I like my mac. iTunes automatically organizes my music collection in a very accessible manner, with a few rules applied to mail I can quickly organize all my email messages, with expose I can find the window I need with the touch of a button(since I tend to leave too many open), and with spotlight I can quickly find the version of my resume I want to use with just a few terms. I am much more productive because I can be neat without having to slave over it. Time saving and neatness aren't mutually exclusive.
Monstar L
I've noticed this before. A colleague of mine tidies twice every day, at least 15 minutes in total. Everything must be neat and tidy and filed when he leaves his desk, even at lunchtime. He belives this makes him more productive and has said so to me.
I tidy once per month. It may take me 2 hours to do. He's spent 7.5 hours tidying. I've spent 2... I guess that the extra 5.5 hours I get to put in are somehow ignored.
As long as no one else starts interfering with my desk then I can find everything I need as a messy desk automatically sorts itself by usefulness order. If I use something a lot then it's towards the front of my desk. The less I use something the more it migrates to the back.
Much of the time I end up working more slowly just after a tidy as I have to start fetching things back from files. The tidying processes main purpose is as a filter. If an item no longer needs to be on my desk (older paperwork ect) it will not return unlike the regular files which will have reappeared on my desk by the end of the week.
I completely agree. Everyone has their own system. People with messy desks don't just shove stuff anywhere. They put it where they will find it again.
This has all been discussed before in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
America, Home of the Brave.
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.
I agree with most everything said, but to add my 2 cents, I believe that moderate messyness is good because it works like a cache and a priority queue.
If I am a neat freak and put everything away, then its a waste of time to continually get and put away what I'm working with. Think of this like a cache.
Now for the priority queue, when I'm a little messy, the important stuff floats to the top. As the mess gets higher and deeper, after a while the stuff on the bottom becomes unimportant, and can then be cleaned up (similar to garbage collection).
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.
So true. Again with my computer analogy, this is when you have TLB misses, or cache misses, or you are thrashing your swap. All of those things are OK if its not a chronic problem, but if it is a chronic problem, well then, its a chronic problem.
This is probably the most insightful post on the topic so far. The key to productiviy is that the producer must be able to catalog the information for efficient retrieval. Filing cabinets and stacks and folders are all very good storge methods for retrieval, especially when there is more than one individual involved. But for an individual project, someone who can remember where everything is in a "mess" by using their own mental filing index can be just as efficient, and moreso if the retrieval of the information takes less time than waliking to a defined filing area.
The danger of this is that you are zero fault tolerant - one bus (or lottery ticket, for you optimists) is all it takes to cause a significant setback in the project schedule. It also reduces parallelism on projects which require the coordination of many people who must access the information on a regular basis.
I am, admitedly, a piler, and I have a very large desk (3'x8' plus a 3'x4' section for the computer) but I find that beyond a certain level of randomness I lose efficiency. I keep things out so I don't forget about them, but it make it very difficult for the others in my office to find things. I have to let my efficiency suffer a small amount by filing things, but the overall productivity of the office increases when I do so.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The secretary at a small doctors office I use to go to had a simple, disorginized and ingenously effective method of ordering her files on pacients. She kept all the pacient's files in a singe file. Whenever a paicent came in, she would search through the file for that pacient's chart, find it and give it to the doctor. When she recieved it back from the doctor she put it in the front. If you think of the worst case search time (the "Big O"), it was terrible(O(n) ), she might have to search through every single file to get to the one she wanted. But the avrage search time was very fast. Why? Because chances were very good that the file she was looking for was at the front of the file. Most of the time the same pacients came in over and over again, and their files stayed at the fron, making them easy to find. I only came in once a year, and my file was at the back, it took her a long time to find mine, but had to do it very infrequently, and she didn't have to search past mine to get to the files of her frequent visitors. This is a simple method of storing data, that requires a minimum of effort to maintain but is effective if certin critera are met: 1) Some things are used more frequently than others, and 2) the total number of things is not too large.
Now consider the stack of papers on a slobs desk. Whenever he needs something in it, he searches through his pile. When he finds and finishes with it, what does he do? He's lazy so he just throws it on the top of the pile.
Just something to think about...
If it's dead, you killed it.
In other words, and say it slowly with me, "Correlation does NOT equal causation."
While I am glad that more people seam to understand this concept, most people take it to an extreme. While a correlation does not equal causation, correlations are not useless. Almost everything we as humans know about anything started with a correlation. Finding correlations is what leads us to causational relationships.
Finding a correlation in research is the first important step. They should not be ignored, or denounced simply because they are "only" correlations. These correlations should be used to warrant further research to find out what the cause of the correlations are.
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-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Sounds sorta like a caching algorithm. As items are used, they are left on top. Temporal locality says that all the important items will be on top of the other items.
But then we get a garbage collection algorithm, too. Every so often, the short-lived objects which are no longer important are removed in your tidying process.
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Actually, 20 years ago they figured out highly intelligent "anal retentive" people (i.e. intelligent perfectionists) were frequently slobs precisely because they could look at a huge mess and instantly understand everything that needed to be done, and be all at once overwhelmed by the magnitude of it, and just not bother.
Whereas, presumably, stupider people, perfectionist or otherwise, would just get started and take a break or give up for a few days after awhile.
This is why video games are so insideuos -- it lets people of normal behavior ape that of intelligent perfectionists -- getting all the positive, "you're special" strokes of accomplishment while not actually accomplishing anything of value.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.