Cluttered Comfort

A lively and overstated case for messiness at home and in the workplace.

Can faith in messiness really bring efficiency? Abrahamson and Freedman — predictably, one a professor, at Columbia University’s business school, and the latter a journalist — juxtapose two ways of organising one’s papers. First consider the Noguchi filing system, they say.

Named after Japanese economist and guru of “hyperorganization”, here is how it works. “Every single incoming document, no matter what it is, is placed in a large envelope. The contents are noted on the side of the envelope, which is then placed on its edge on a shelf, so that all the envelopes line up in a horizontal row like books. New envelopes are inserted on the left side of the row, and any envelope that’s taken out is put back on the left. After a while, those envelopes that contain the most recent and most often accessed documents will end up on the left side of the row, while the oldest and least used documents will be on the right. In theory, this makes documents easier to access, since they are automatically prioritized by frequency of use.”

Those with a high tolerance of clutter and a flair for working through it, the writers say, will find this strategy familiar. Except that they don’t put in much effort to operationalise this organising principle. When papers and files are piled up on a desk, the most frequently used and the most recently accessed will tend to be nearer the top of the heap. The same, one supposes, applies to messy closets.

Story continues below this ad

Abrahamson and Freedman make a passionate — and amusingly overstated — case for messiness. Not only is it often inefficient to try to straighten the clutter, but the effort is also unnecessarily costly. But how do we define the kind of mess that is being celebrated? “Roughly speaking, a system is messy if its elements are scattered, mixed up, or varied due to some measure of randomness, or if for all practical purposes it appears random from someone’s point of view.”

The authors at various points invite the reader to imagine how bereft of certain scientific discoveries we would be without fortuitous messiness. Wilhelm Rontgen could have had a more arduous time discovering X-rays. Alexander Fleming may actually never have discovered penicillin. (In fact, his lab has been reconstructed in a London hospital from photographs and it is by all accounts a tribute to unfettered messiness.)

But it is not just desks and workspaces that benefit from messiness. We may, argue the writers, be more rooted if we didn’t try to order out thought (with the perils it brings of “fabricating justice”, “neatening sights and sounds”, imposing “Roshomonic memory” and “neatening chance”). And as for all those management consultants and container salespersons who cite studies to show how neater organisation — in processes, personnel and materials — works, they ask the reader to remember the Hawthorne effect. By this, they say people tend to work harder when they know they are being observed. So any change that comes in a period of intense observation will probably work.

In a most amusing case study, they put Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ability to get so many tasks accomplished in his many careers simultaneously down to his refusal to commit to a schedule. “By blending several types of mess — the time sprawl of not keeping a schedule, the improvisation in his commitments, the blurring of political and social boundaries, the inconsistency in his stances, the distraction in jumping between careers — Schwarzenegger has essentially fashioned himself as an easily customizable and recustomizable figure.”

Story continues below this ad

Is this case against organisation and neatness overstretched? Yes, of course. Which is just as well — it makes for a lively read, and given the obvious zeal with which the arguments are made, the reader is forced to keep a sense of perspective.