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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."
In other news: People with Anorexia found to be more productive than normal eaters.
"It's quite ingenious!" exclaimed one researcher, "it seems that because Anorexics do not need to take time to eat, they are far more productive!"
When asked whether health implications or possible mortality ensuing from Anorexia could negatively affect productivity, the researcher seemed angered, and left the interview.
On a serious note. 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.
The article is about clutter not hygiene.
My guess -- this article was written by a slob.
Which is the perfect excuse to ask for a raise!
;-)
"But, boss, you really have to admit that MY desk is much more messier than everyone else in this company! I demand more money! See here? We are talking about a freaking 3 DAYS OLD PIZZA, buried under papers and backup tapes for chrissake!!"
I hasten to say that I already got a raise. I am just rehearsing for the end of the year review...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Clean desk
I'm just to busy being productive and I can't remember which stack of papers my keyboard is under.
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.
Take solace in the fact that your roommate's toothbrush is now used only to clean his teeth.
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.
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
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.
Clutter hint:
Switch to a trackball as your primary pointing device. That way you'll have an extra square foot or so of horizontal desk surface on which to pile things!
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
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
But I can't count the number of times that either being more of a neatnik about something has saved me a huge headache or if I had been more organized how much of a headache I could have avoided.
Yes, if everything goes well then NOT taking the time to follow proper procedures will save you loads of time. However, proper procedures are there because when things go wrong (and they always do) you save more than just time. While the study may try to account for the time saved by being neat as not overcoming the time lost, a straight time-to-time comparison just doesn't cut it. For example, on Project A the Project Manager ensures that everyone follows a strict quality assurance plan. On Project B they let everyone handle their own quality and just trust that it is happening. Project A takes two weeks longer to deliver than originally anticipated because of some random occurence. Project B was affected by the same random occurence but launched early because they didn't go through a quality assurance process. Client suddenly realizes that Project B only half works and fumes but there's time to fix it. Project B then launches on-time (instead of early) after fixes. Even assuming Project B doesn't require additional fixes, Project A is better off because the client received a quality product the first time.
And furthermore, saying neat squashes creativity is the true slobs excuse for not trying. If your creative process is so fragile that it requires things to be cluttered all over the place, you're creative value is NILL.
Anyway, I doubt there will be too many people here who agree with this study, though there can certainly be cases where neatness is taken too far.
It's just an efficient hashing algorithm.
Canthros
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.
Don't bother to RTFA. That was the only interesting thing in what is an incredibly lame piece of writing (presumably with a worse book to come).
So, now that I have saved you some time, clean your desk!
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.
I bet I'm not the only one with a significant other that drives them nuts by tidying up all the time. A typical conversation might go something like this:
Me [settling down to watch a movie]: Where is the HMDI lead?
Her Wherever you last left it.
Me I left it on the floor behind the TV.
Her Well I haven't touched it.
Me You must have, it can't have moved itself.
Her I definately haven't moved it. You're always loosing things.
Me Do you even know what it is?
Her What is it?
Me It's a black cable. It was on the floor behind the TV.
Her Oh, I might have put it in one of the boxes in the shed.
Me [angry] So now I've got to put my shoes on and go out into the cold to look through all the boxes in the shed!
Her Don't blame me! You're the untidy one that is always loosing things...
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.
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.
:(){
"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.
Blinky's desk is a heap. Ask him to find a post-it, it's right on top. Ask him to find a functional spec from six months ago, he's got to sift through everything. After he uses them he leaves them on top of the desk.
Pinky's desk is totally neat. Ask him to find a post-it, he opens the drawer for "P", does binary search, then finds the post-it. Ask him to find a functional spec from six months ago, that's under "F", same thing. After he uses them, he puts them both away, same procedure. If he's got to refer to the spec ten times, he finds it and puts it away ten times.
Inky's desk has a heap on top but the drawers are sorted. He can find a post-it as fast as Blinky and the spec from six months ago as fast as Pinky. When he's done he leaves the post-it on top of the desk and puts the spec back in its proper place. Though the second time he has to refer to the spec, he leaves it on his desk. Every few months he finds his heap is slow, so he puts everything that he hasn't used in the last week away in the proper drawer.
My wife is a neatnik. She always likes things in order.
:)
However, she is the most productive worker in her department... as long as her desk stays organized.
If things get slightly out of order, it takes her several hours to get things back the way she wants it, and occasionally she feels that her design isn't 100% efficient, so she'll reorganize. Once she's satisfied, she switches into high speed and rarely makes mistakes.
At home, her desk is a mess. Go figure
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.