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."

Indeed?

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.

Re:Indeed?

I think you are missing the point. Messy people aren't more productive because they save time on not clearing things up. The theory is that our brains are not organized in the same orderly manner as books on a library shelf. Our minds are actually quite messy and random, which allows us to be flexible and creative by linking seemingly unrelated things together in an instance. A messy desk may just be a physical manifestation of our thought process which is why we are more comfortable with it than with an unnatural sorting system.

Re:Indeed?

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.

Re:Indeed?

Wait... I'm a slob/perfectionist and I like videogames. Actually I have no problem keeping a room clean if I know where everything goes (such as a bathroom, or our TV/family room). It's stuff that I don't have a specific place for (interesting magazine articles, stocking stuffers, videogame tchotskes, mail) that piles up and requires great effort (and great levels of nagging by my SO) to deal with. I also know why there is only one space after a period -- you don't need two spaces after a period if you're using a porportionally spaced font. See here [webword.com] for more details, esp. as relates to the interwebs. I found that article while I was digging through my desk looking for last year's girl scout cookies.

Re:Indeed?

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.

--

Re:Indeed?

a friend of mine who breeds small animals for use as bedding

Now THIS is an idea whose time has come! Imagine laying down at night in a nice fluffy bed of badgers.

Re:Indeed?

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.

Most Recently Used policy

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.

Re:Indeed?

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.

Woah there. Messy!=dirty. My place might look like a hurricane hit it, but I keep it clean.

Re:Indeed?

Dude (shaking head), People with Anorexia HAVE a disorder, they aren't necessarily organizing things in a disorderly fashion.

As for me I'm set, I'm pretty messy

Re:Indeed?

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...

Re:Just as disorganized as we need to be

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.

Attention Slashdotters

The article is about clutter not hygiene.

Re:Attention Slashdotters

There is no less time organizing = more time working, that is a mis-interpretation of the idea.

The idea here is that a 'un-organized' person is not not un-organized. Instead this person's brain is able to keep much better tabs on where things are. Their memory serves as their reference base. Should they need something, they check their memory for its location, and knowing where it is, proceed to retrieve it. The aparant 'chaos' is not really a hindrance to a person who can literally sense where the things in his house are. There is no need to visually organize it, since visually organizing it would be an advantage to spot an item if you don't already know where it is. But since there people already know where the item is, visual organization never crosses their mind.

I'm not an 'authority' on this, but I feel comfortable speaking on it since 1.) I have ADD, and 2.) I can relate and understand this kind of multitasking the brain does in other people with ADD.

I hope that explains it better. =D

Motivation

My guess -- this article was written by a slob.

I knew it!

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... ;-)

Clean desk ...

Clean desk ... cluttered mind. [eom]

I would reply to this but...

I'm just to busy being productive and I can't remember which stack of papers my keyboard is under.

Re:I would reply to this but...

You call yourself a geek? I'm looking for my paper under a stack of keyboards!

Re:Well yeah...

Take solace in the fact that your roommate's toothbrush is now used only to clean his teeth.

Absolutes are almost never correct

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.

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. :-P

Re:Absolutes are almost never correct

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.

that all fine and well.....

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.

Re:that all fine and well.....

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.

This is why I was so effective a slob bachelor, but can't find sh*t as a married man.

Wife: "Why can't you put things away?!"
Me: "Why can't you leave my stuff where I put it?! Stop moving stuff around!"
Wife: "How can you find anything when it's all over the place?"
Me: "When I was a bachelor I knew where everything was. The reason I can't find anything now is that you keep moving things around!"

AARRGH! This same thing must play out in so many households. Of course it's always the "messy" person who's "at fault".

Flawed refutation: neatness != organization

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.

He seems to think that "neatness" requires

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.

Re:I am a slob

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.

Chaos

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.

Re:Chaos

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.

Re:I know where stuff is

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!

Not surprising

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...

This is nonsense.

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.

Re:This is nonsense.

Go so a good mechanic; the shop is organized and neat.

I respectfully disagree with you on this point. Some of the best mechanics I've seen have spare parts, dismantled vehicles, and toolboxes seemingly strewn about in a haphazard fashion. Yet they can diagnose and repair an issue inside 15 minutes. They even know how to bring a past-its-prime vehicle back from the dead.

On the other hand, the corporate meathead mechanics (who couldn't diagnose a flat tire without a computer telling them that it's flat) tend to keep incredibly clean shops. All their tools are put away neatly, old parts are never kept as spares, oil is cleaned up as soon as its spilled, and all the new parts are safely warehoused in their original boxes. Very neat and tidy, but utterly useless to the customer. Especially when it takes then three and a half hours to put a new battery in a vehicle. :-/

I am probably on the "slob" side of things..

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 not a cluttered mess.

It's just an efficient hashing algorithm.

Re:Cleaning can be costly

No. In our cleanup, we actually found $12000 worth of stuff that we needed for our current project and a missing employee.