New York Times
Saying Yes to Mess
By PENELOPE GREEN
Published: December 21, 2006
IT is a truism of American life that we're too darn messy, or we think
we are, and we feel really bad about it. Our desks and dining room
tables are awash with paper; our closets are bursting with clothes and
sports equipment and old files; our laundry areas boil; our basements
and garages seethe. And so do our partners — or our parents, if we
happen to be teenagers.
This is why sales of home-organizing products, like accordion files
and labelmakers and plastic tubs, keep going up and up, from $5.9
billion last year to a projected $7.6 billion by 2009, as do the
revenues of companies that make closet organizing systems, an industry
that is pulling in $3 billion a year, according to Closets magazine.
This is why January is now Get Organized Month, thanks also to the
efforts of the National Association of Professional Organizers, whose
4,000 clutter-busting members will be poised, clipboards and trash bags
at the ready, to minister to the 10,000 clutter victims the association
estimates will be calling for its members' services just after the new
year.
But contrarian voices can be heard in the wilderness. An
anti-anticlutter movement is afoot, one that says yes to mess and urges
you to embrace your disorder. Studies are piling up that show that
messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber
minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat "office
landscapes") and that messy closet owners are probably better parents
and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts. It's a movement
that confirms what you have known, deep down, all along: really neat
people are not avatars of the good life; they are humorless and
inflexible prigs, and have way too much time on their hands.
"It's chasing an illusion to think that any organization — be it a
family unit or a corporation — can be completely rid of disorder on any
consistent basis," said Jerrold Pollak, a neuropsychologist at Seacoast
Mental Health Center in Portsmouth, N.H., whose work involves helping
people tolerate the inherent disorder in their lives. "And if it could,
should it be? Total organization is a futile attempt to deny and
control the unpredictability of life. I live in a world of total
clutter, advising on cases where you'd think from all the paper it's
the F.B.I. files on the Unabomber," when, in fact, he said, it's only
"a person with a stiff neck."
"My wife has threatened divorce over all the piles," continued Dr.
Pollack, who has an office at home, too. "If we had kids the health
department would have to be alerted. But what can I do?"
Stop feeling bad, say the mess apologists. There are more urgent things
to worry about. Irwin Kula is a rabbi based in Manhattan and author of
"Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life," which was
published by Hyperion in September. "Order can be profane and
life-diminishing," he said the other day. "It's a flippant remark, but
if you've never had a messy kitchen, you've probably never had a
home-cooked meal. Real life is very messy, but we need to have models
about how that messiness works."
His favorite example? His 15-year-old daughter Talia's bedroom, a
picture of utter disorder — and individuality, he said.
"One day I'm standing in front of the door," he said, "and it's out of
control and my wife, Dana, is freaking out, and suddenly I see in all
the piles the dress she wore to her first dance and an earring she wore
to her bat mitzvah. She's so trusting her journal is wide open on the
floor, and there are photo-booth pictures of her friends strewn
everywhere. I said, 'Omigod, her cup overflows!' And we started to
laugh."
The room was an invitation, he said, to search for a deeper meaning
under the scurf.
Last week David H. Freedman, another amiable mess analyst (and science
journalist), stood bemused in front of the heathery tweed collapsible
storage boxes with clear panels ($29.99) at the Container Store in
Natick, Mass., and suggested that the main thing most people's closets
are brimming with is unused organizing equipment. "This is another
wonderful trend," Mr. Freedman said dryly, referring to the clear
panels. "We're going to lose the ability to put clutter away. Inside
your storage box, you'd better be organized."
Mr. Freedman is co-author, with Eric Abrahamson, of "A Perfect Mess:
The Hidden Benefits of Disorder," out in two weeks from Little, Brown &
Company. The book is a meandering, engaging tour of beneficial mess and
the systems and individuals reaping those benefits, like Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger, whose mess-for-success tips include never making a
daily schedule.
As a corollary, the book's authors examine the high cost of neatness —
measured in shame, mostly, and family fights, as well as wasted dollars
— and generally have a fine time tipping over orthodoxies and poking
fun at clutter busters and their ilk, and at the self-help tips they
live or die by. They wonder: Why is it better to pack more activities
into one day? By whose standards are procrastinators less effective
than their well-scheduled peers? Why should children have to do chores
to earn back their possessions if they leave them on the floor, as many
professional organizers suggest?
In their book Mr. Freedman and Mr. Abrahamson describe the properties
of mess in loving terms. Mess has resonance, they write, which means it
can vibrate beyond its own confines and connect to the larger world. It
was the overall scumminess of Alexander Fleming's laboratory that led
to his discovery of penicillin, from a moldy bloom in a petri dish he
had forgotten on his desk.
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Mess is robust and adaptable, like Mr. Schwarzenegger's open calendar,
as opposed to brittle, like a parent's rigid schedule that doesn't
allow for a small child's wool-gathering or balkiness. Mess is
complete, in that it embraces all sorts of random elements. Mess tells
a story: you can learn a lot about people from their detritus, whereas
neat — well, neat is a closed book. Neat has no narrative and no
personality (as any cover of Real Simple magazine will demonstrate).
Mess is also natural, as Mr. Freedman and Mr. Abrahamson point out, and
a real time-saver. "It takes extra effort to neaten up a system," they
write. "Things don't generally neaten themselves."
Indeed, the most valuable dividend of living with mess may be time. Mr.
Freedman, who has three children and a hard-working spouse, Laurie
Tobey-Freedman, a preschool special-needs coordinator, is studying
Mandarin in his precious spare moments. Perusing a four-door stainless
steel shoe cabinet ($149) at the Container Store, and imagining
gussying up a shoe collection, he shook his head and said, "I don't get
the appeal of this, which may be a huge defect on my part in terms of
higher forms of entertainment."
The success of the Container Store notwithstanding, there is indeed
something messy — and not in a good way — about so many organizing
options. "When I think about this urge to organize, it reminds me of
how it was when Americans began to take more and more control of their
weight: they got fatter," said Marian Salzman, chief marketing officer
of J. Walter Thompson and co-author, with Ira Matathia, of "Next Now:
Trends for the Future," which is about to be published by Palgrave
Macmillan. "I never gained weight until I went on a diet," she said,
adding that she has a room in which she hides a treadmill and, now, two
bags of organizing supplies.
"I got sick of looking at them so I bought plastic tubs and stuffed the
bags in the tubs and put the tubs in the room." Right now, she said,
"we are emotionally overloaded, and so what this is about is that we
are getting better and better at living superficially."
"Superficial is the new intimate," Ms. Salzman said, gaining steam,
"and these boxes, these organizing supplies, are the containers for all
our superficial selves. 'I will be a neater mom, a hipper mom, a mom
that gets more done.' Do I sound cynical?"
Nah.
In the semiotics of mess, desks may be the richest texts. Messy-desk
research borrows from cognitive ergonomics, a field of study dealing
with how a work environment supports productivity. Consider that desks,
our work landscapes, are stand-ins for our brains, and so the piles we
array on them are "cognitive artifacts," or data cues, of our thoughts
as we work.
To a professional organizer brandishing colored files and stackable
trays, cluttered horizontal surfaces are a horror; to cognitive
psychologists like Jay Brand, who works in the Ideation Group of
Haworth Inc., the huge office furniture company, their peaks and
valleys glow with intellectual intent and showcase a mind whirring
away: sorting, linking, producing. (By extension, a clean desk can be
seen as a dormant area, an indication that no thought or work is being
undertaken.)
His studies and others, like a survey conducted last year by Ajilon
Professional Staffing, in Saddle Brook, N.J., which linked messy desks
to higher salaries (and neat ones to salaries under $35,000), answer
Einstein's oft-quoted remark, "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a
cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk?"
Don Springer, 61, is an information technology project manager and the
winner of the Type O-No! contest sponsored by Dymo, the labelmaker
manufacturer, in October. The contest offered $5,000 worth of clutter
management — for the tools (the boxes, the bins and the systems, as
well as a labelmaker) and the services of a professional organizer — to
the best example of a "clutter nightmare," as expressed by contestants
in a photograph and a 100-word essay. "Type O-Nos," reads a definition
on the Dymo Web site, are "outlaws on the tidy trail, clutter criminals
twice over."
Mr. Springer, who in a phone interview spoke softly, precisely and with
great humor, professed deep shame over the contents of what he calls
his oh-by-the-way room, a library/junk room that his wife would like
cleaned to make a nursery for a new grandchild. With a full-time job
and membership in various clubs and organizations, and a desire to
spend his free time seeing a movie with his wife instead of "expending
the emotional energy it would take to sort through all the stuff," Mr.
Springer said, he is unable to prune the piles to his wife's
satisfaction. "There are emotional treasures buried in there, and I
don't want to part with them," he said.
So, why bother?
"Because I love my wife and I want to make her happy," he said.
According to a small survey that Mr. Freedman and Mr. Abrahamson
conducted for their book — 160 adults representing a cross section of
genders, races and incomes, Mr. Freedman said — of those who had split
up with a partner, one in 12 had done so over a struggle involving one
partner's idea of mess. Happy partnerships turn out not necessarily to
be those in which products from Staples figure largely. Mr. Freedman
and his wife, for example, have been married for over two decades, and
live in an offhandedly messy house with a violently messy basement —
the latter area, where their three children hang out, decorated (though
that's not quite the right word) in a pre-1990s Tompkins Square Park
lean-to style.
The room's chaos is an example of one of Mr. Freedman and Mr.
Abrahamson's mess strategies, which is to create a mess-free DMZ (in
this case, the basement stairs) and acknowledge areas of complementary
mess. Cherish your mess management strategies, suggested Mr. Freedman,
speaking approvingly of the pile builders and the under-the-bed
stuffers; of those who let their messes wax and wane — the cyclers, he
called them; and those who create satellite messes (in storage units
off-site). "Most people don't realize their own efficiency or
effectiveness," he said with a grin.
It's also nice to remember, as Mr. Freedman pointed out, that almost
anything looks pretty neat if it's shuffled into a pile.
