Work Daze

Personal question – does your company have rules for desk hygiene?

I once had a job where it was mandatory to clear your desk every night before you left, except for personal items, like a photo of your family or your pet. And there were rules for those photos, as well. You had to use a company-approved picture frame, no larger (or smaller) than the company-approved dimensions of 5 x 7 inches. I tried to get around the rule with a 16 x 20 Kodacolor of my boss, but it didn’t work. The office manager wrote me up for the infraction, and, even though the company and I parted ways many years ago, I’m sure the misdemeanor still lives on in my permanent record.

Too bad I did not have for my defense a copy of an excellent and much-needed new book, “A Perfect Mess,” by Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman. This important text is a study of the messes for the masses, and even more important, the benefits that derive from clutter and confusion.

According to the authors, what looks like a messy desk to others can be, to its owner, a well-organized filing system with all the data retrieval power of a super-computer. Ask the man or woman behind the clutter for a document and chances are, they will be able to reach into the paper pile and pull out exactly what was requested.

Moreover, there is often method to the madness of a messy desk. Less important files move to the bottom, while critical files rise to the top. In this way, a messy desk is really a living, breathing creature – a paper biomass with a mind, and a life all its own. [Perhaps this is why it tends to grow until it swallows its owner, thus saving the organization the time and cost of a painful firing.]

There are other advantages to office clutter and disorder. If a worker does not spend time trying to keep her desk clean, she is free to spend more time on more critical business issues, like inventing new products and developing new profit centers. A perfectly messy desk can also serve as a catalyst for new ideas – the juxtaposition of random memos and reports serving as a spark for out of the box thinking. [Months of clutter can also serve as a spark for an office fire, so management should make sure that clutter-challenged employees are sitting near the fire extinguisher.]

Of course, it is useless to explain to the neatniks that run most businesses that untidiness is a virtue. Even the fact that Albert Einstein preferred to work in chaos does not carry much weight. And yet it is true. “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind,” the famous thinker once remarked, “of what then, is an empty desk?”

One technological advance that may help the messier among us survive is the personal computer. Living in the age of electronic information it is possible to have a perfectly clean desk and a totally cluttered work style. Instead of piling papers on your desk, and your credenza, and your bookcase, and your toaster-oven, simply file every e-mail, e-memo, and e-document you receive in one big desktop folder, along with your important recipes, critical eBay bids, urgent invoices from your aroma therapist, and assorted downloads from GiveBrittanyABreak.com.

Alas, the computer has not brought a halt to the tyranny of the neatniks. Every week brings new books on how to organize your life. There are even television programs where a team of fussbudgets are sent on guerrilla missions to unclutter the homes of ordinary citizens. And if you think the neatness Nazis are going to allow a constitutional amendment to give Americans the fundamental right to a messy desk, forget it.

I’m afraid businesses will also continue to reward the tidy and punish the messy. There are over 3,000 members of the National Association of Professional Organizers (or NAPO), which promotes a variety of feel-bad events, designed to make us patronize the services of its members and the products of its sponsors (including the dreaded labeler lobby.)

What does all this mean? I’m afraid at a loss for a summation. I had already created my conclusion, which was really well written and quite soul-stirring, but I’m afraid I lost it in this big pile of papers on my desk. Somebody put in an emergency call to NAPO. Really, I’ve got to get organized.