Archives for Counterpoint
Do organized people have a bad reputation?
I received an interesting e-mail message the other day:
Why should I bother getting rid of my clutter if my clutter doesn’t bother me? It only seems to be a problem for other people.
I receive dozens of e-mails like this a month. They’re messages from people who stumble upon the website and feel a need to defend their messy way of life. The incorrect assumption is always that since we talk about home and office organizing on Unclutterer, we believe that we’re better than messy people.
At a networking event last year, a woman I had just met told me she hated people like me. She said that she hates organized, tightly wound people who look down their noses at messy people. She made these comments after I said only the words, “Hi, I’m Erin. I’m editor-in-chief of a website called Unclutterer.com.”
I haven’t quite figured out why, but there does seem to be the misconception that organized people spend a great amount of time looking down on people who are messy. How did this inaccurate stereotype develop? Why is pursuing an organized life considered to be one full of judgment?
The reality (or, at least my reality) is that I barely have the time to do the things I want to do. I want to help people who want my help to be more organized and live more simply. I want to be a good friend to my friends, and a good family member to my family. I want to be happy. I don’t have the time or desire to judge people because they are messy. And, since I used to be completely disorganized, I would have to look down on my past self — and I don’t have the time to do that, either.
What are your thoughts? Why do you think organized people get a bad rap? More importantly, what can all of us do to put these inaccurate and judgmental stereotypes to rest? Or, am I off base, and are most organized people standing around thinking bad thoughts about messy people? I’m interested in reading your opinions in the comments.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted by Erin on Feb 9, 2009 |
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Unitaskers we love
Each Wednesday, when we make fun of unitaskers, we usually report on the most ridiculous items we can find. Cat wigs! Large, electrical martini shakers! Monogrammed branding irons for your steaks!
We’ve found that there are so many outrageous possibilities for sale that we can avoid writing about the more common unitaskers that grace our homes. It’s safe to assume, however, that anyone with a kitchen has at least one prized unitasker in his or her collection. For example, my friend Ann swears by her egg timer, which does nothing except sit in the water while she hard boils eggs. (Ann may have had an incident once involving eggs shooting out of a pan and exploding because she fell asleep while making them. Maybe. And, if that is the case, I think her egg timer is a perfect unitasker for her and those of us who may get near her kitchen.)
In a fun tribute to less outrageous unitaskers, I thought today would be a good day to sing the praises of the unitaskers we love and make space for in our homes. Here are my additions, and I look forward to reading your unitaskers in the comments:
Fire extinguisher. I have to agree with Alton Brown on this one, and admit that my fire extinguisher serves an important, but solitary purpose in my home. If you don’t have one of these, you should get one (or more) and keep it handy.
Ice cream maker. Much to Matt’s disdain, I love my ice cream maker. I fill it with fresh cream from my farmer’s market and invent sweet creations on a weekly basis. I can’t imagine living without this unitasker.
Lever-style wine opener. It takes up an absurd amount of space in our cabinet, but I can’t get a cork out of a wine bottle any other way. I can pretend to be effective with a fully manual style, but then I have to strain cork out of the wine before I drink it. When we got this contraption for a wedding present, I did a dance of joy.
Tomato knife. I don’t own one of these, but my food-guru friend Kim is in love with hers and insists that I mention it as a cannot-live-without item. In theory, you can use it on tomatoes AND bagels, but Kim won’t support any of that multiple use talk. If you eat tomatoes all summer long, then apparently this is the unitasker to woo your heart.
Are you a fan of the cherry pitter? Are you like Ann and love your hard boiled egg timer or Kim and her tomato knife? Sing the praises of your favorite unitasker in the comments!
Popularity: 10% [?]
Posted by Erin on Jul 16, 2008 |
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In defense of a messy desk
A Financial Times Deutschland article asks the following question: “If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what does an empty desk say about the quality of your ideas?” I guess the assumption is an empty desk equals an empty mind. I think an empty mind can help you focus on what the task at hand is, while a cluttered mind makes it a bit more difficult to concentrate.
The article continues:
Ian Smalley, creative director of corporate digital communications agency CTN, is a believer in just that sort of messy medium.
The perimeter of his desk is delineated by towers of paper: “I have a relatively big desk so as long as there is elbow room, things tend to pile up, even if some of them do date back to 2004.”
But his main reason for untidiness is lack of time to tidy:
“It is a busy environment and at the end of the day, while all confidential documents are shredded and recycled, I want to leave and see my son, not file bits of paper.” He adds: “I can get a professional-looking desk by doing a ‘five-minute tidy’ where I straighten all the piles of paper up if I need to.”
Keeping a clean workspace isn’t the only key to being successful at your job, but it doesn’t hurt. Yes, there are some people with tidy desks who don’t have the best work ethic and there are people with messy desks who are invaluable to their companies. But, as a rule of thumb, it can be more efficient to have a well organized workspace. An organized workspace allows you to focus on the task at hand rather than losing focus while looking for a misplaced paper or file.
What do you think of the article? Agree or disagree? I’m eager to read your responses to it.
Popularity: 9% [?]
Posted by Matt on Jul 5, 2008 |
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In Praise Of (A Little) Mess: Be (A Little) Scruffy
At Unclutterer, we know that getting started on an organization project can be a difficult task — especially when your home or office are in complete disarray. Since we believe in baby steps, we wanted to present a guest post from someone who has found that a little mess is still better than a lot of mess, and that striving for perfection may not be necessary (at least not immediately). Thank you, Stowe Boyd, for once again sharing your valuable insights with us!
I am not a naturally organized person. Left to my own devices, I think I might have become a truly obsessively messy type. As it is, I have adopted some of the tools of being organized — like task lists, and well-honed scheduling for meetings and calls — but I am definitely a bit scruffy compared to most.
I use the term scruffy not just for a poetic turn of phrase, but in its application as a scientific term among those who study human organization, pro and con.
[from A Perfect Mess, by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman]
What is it in your office environment that helps you figure our how to pick up where you left off or to being a new task, when you’re interrupted, leave the office, or finish a task? “Neats,” he’s [researcher David Kirsch] found, depend on a small number of “explicit coordinating structures” such as lists, day planners, and in-boxes to quickly and surely determine what to do next. Scruffies, on the other hand, are “data driven” — that is they don’t explicitly plan out and specify what they do but instead rely on the office environment to give them clues and prompts, in the form of documents lying on the desk, files piled up on top of the filing cabinet, comments scribbled on envelopes, Post-it notes (which , surprisingly, many Neats disdain) stuck here and there, books left open on the floor, and so forth.
Kirsch and others have shown that Scruffies do overestimate their ability to keep track of things in the physical world as a means of structuring work, but they have also demonstrated that Scruffies gain a significant amount of traction from this approach, anyway. Perhaps most important, Kirsch states that different folks work better in ‘different work landscapes:
“People shape their environment over time until it conforms to the way they are comfortable working, even if it seems out of control to someone else.”
Worst of all, trying to make Scruffies into Neats won’t work, and will just make them less productive. They will just end up disorganized anyway.
So, organizations may want to be somewhat more tolerant of (slightly) cluttered desks than they generally are. Many companies have an explicit clean desk policy that simply doesn’t take into account the brain/desk landscape relationship of Scruffies.
The Iowa-based First Federal Bankshares posted their policy on the web:
Work areas should be kept neat and orderly. The Company must always look its best. Just as we are judged by our personal appearance, so is the Company. Good housekeeping makes it easier to organize your work, prevents loss of items, and provides a professional appearance. Excessive display of personal items is unprofessional. Supervisors and managers are expected to maintain a professional appearance in their department and stores, and they may request that you remove items if they detract from a professional appearance. In addition, they may require you to clean or straighten your work area.
The implication is clear: a well-ordered desk leads to better work habits. Or else.
Let’s be clear: I am not advocating McDonald’s wrappers under the desk, or a White Snake poster in the cubicle. But leaving your active work open on your desk when you leave for the day — three folders, a manual, a stack of reports on the corner of desk, and post it notes hanging off your PC monitor — could save an hour of time the next morning. Every morning. And trying to force Scruffies to be Neats just won’t work.
Some of this is driven by senior executives who have assistants to keep their desktops empty, and some of it is motivated by a misplaced overemphasis on empty desks as a good in their own right, independent of actual functionality.
Many extremely productive people rely on a messy work landscape. Looking at the desk of a busy scientific genius, it’s clear that the piles of papers and books that fill the surface give a pretty good indication of what an Einstein has been working on recently.
Albert Einstein has been considered the patron saint of useful messiness, and once stated “The cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind; what does an empty desk sign?”
You might say that a messy desk is fine if you are a Da Vinci, but the average guy isn’t a Da Vinci, and without genius you need structure to compensate.
The evidence suggests otherwise. There is a psychological division in the world, and all the hypothetical benefits of an uncluttered desk simply don’t play if you are a Scruffy.
There are many other benefits of (a little) mess, not the least of which is that the novelty of looking up from our task lists periodically, and scanning the real world for new inputs can enliven a hidebound agenda of work, work, work.
Kevin Kelly perhaps takes this thinking to new extremes in his writings on what he calls the “Network Economy” — this new era we live and work in. The gist is that the old measures of personal productivity don’t really matter as much as they once did, as we move away from industrial age notions of work and efficiency, and when the major challenge is not really doing many things but choosing the right thing to do:
Productivity, however, is exactly the wrong thing to care about in the new economy.
The problem with trying to measure productivity is that it measures only how well people can do the wrong jobs. Any job that can be measured for productivity probably should be eliminated from the list of jobs that people do.
In the coming era, doing the exactly right next thing is far more fruitful than doing the same thing twice.
I think that Einstein would have thought a (slightly) messy desk can play a structural role in helping people decide what is the next right thing to do given all the things you might do. Well, at least if you are a Scruffy, anyway.
And what about places like First Federal Bankshares? Increasingly, the sort of work being done in places where clean desks prevail is being automated, so people won’t be processing banking reports, or processing claims, or any of the myriad office jobs of the past. As Kevin Kelly puts it:
Productivity is for machines. If you can measure it, robots should do it.
Perhaps he goes a hair too far into a glistening future, but we shouldn’t accept the premise that invention, insight, and imagination are less important than and somehow disconnected from the tangible landscape of our work, either. We have to accept a (little) disorder in the world, if only for inspiration; and for Scruffies, a smidge of disorder is like a signpost, pointing the way forward.
Signpost image from alisdair.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Posted by Stowe on Jun 11, 2008 |
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Documentarian responds to messy minions
Josh Freed, the man behind My Messy Life, wrote a piece for the Montreal Gazette in which he highlights some of the reactions he received about his film. (I wrote about this documentary a couple weeks ago here.) From the article:
In the program, I revealed my extraordinarily messy office, then visited some stupendous messes with similar “order disorders.” I also teased neat freaks for their obsession with closet organizers, desk organizers and other weapons of mess destruction.
Since then I’ve been inundated by almost 100 letters, mostly from Gazette readers eager to talk about (or rationalize) their own disorderly conduct. I’ve become the man to whom you turn to confess your mess – and the leader of a budding mess liberation movement.
Freed defends his messy file system, or lack there of, while doing so in a tongue-in-cheek manner. Calling himself the “Messiah of Mess” he highlights the his new followers’ reaction to his documentary. While Freed will receive no love from us at Unclutterer, he did admit to tidying up his office after the documentary was finished filming.
The other day I went in and did seven hours of spring cleaning and repiling so I finally know where everything is again. I threw out seven large bags of stuff – and felt great. But trust me: If you walked in, you’d never know the difference.
That’s a good first step, sir. Maybe there is hope for Freed just yet.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Posted by Matt on Jun 7, 2008 |
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Documentary defends the clutter lifestyle
Journalist, author, and filmmaker, Josh Freed, directed and starred in My Messy Life. The film documents his messy lifestyle and defends his “cult of clutter.” From the CTV article:
“My Messy Life,” an original documentary directed by and starring Freed himself, takes a light-hearted look at clutter in a symbolic act of defiance against what Freed calls the “tyranny of the tidy.”
In the film, Freed turns the cameras on his home office, which he aptly calls his “messterpiece.”
Aside from his chair, not a single surface is visible in Freed’s office. Notes plaster walls, bins cover the floor and stacks of paper, files and books consume the desk.
Freed’s way of life is the antithesis of what we strive for here at Unclutterer, but this film looks interesting and entertaining. Freed seems to have a good sense of humor about his organizational skills, or lack there of, so the film seems to be a bit tongue-in-cheek.
Freed did need to have some outside organizing help while making the documentary.
During the making of “My Messy Life” Freed’s producers kept the details in check so he could focus on creating.
You can watch a news clip about the documentary here, but unfortunately we can’t seem to find the whole of the documentary online. Have any of our Canadian readers had the pleasure of viewing this documentary? It originally aired on CTV on May 17.
Popularity: 19% [?]
Posted by Matt on May 26, 2008 |
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Clutter saved their home
As a tornado ripped through a small town in Tennessee, one man’s cluttered trailer was credited with saving the home in which his family sought shelter. From the WSMV-TV article:
A Lawrenceburg man who has saved everything for years said his clutter may have saved his life.
Several homes were destroyed and many more were damaged in Friday’s tornadoes in Lawrence and Giles counties, but Bobby Massey’s family is crediting his bad habit of being a pack rat with saving their house.
I find it hard to believe that a trailer full of clutter withstood the awesome power of a tornado, but the Massey family may argue the contrary.
When the Masseys walked outside, they said the trailer packed with Bobby Massey’s stuff had stood fast and protected the house.
“That thing is loaded down with heavy stuff,” he said.”Had that trailer not been there, what do you think would have happened?” Dorsey asked. “I guarantee you, it would have leveled the house,” he said.
This is one of the first times I can admit to reading a clutter-is-good story. It definitely isn’t persuading me to change my uncluttered ways, but it is interesting. Honestly, I’d be more afraid of what would happen to all that stuff if it were directly hit by a tornado — I’d be terrified of all of the flying projectiles. What do you think? Did clutter save this man’s home?
Popularity: 15% [?]
Posted by Matt on Apr 26, 2008 |
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