Messy Desks Truly Better For Business

I saw a clipping recently - I’m sure it’s here somewhere - which states that people with messy desks waste an average of six weeks a year searching for stuff on their desks.

Let me tell you something. I think they posed the question poorly. The question should be, how many weeks a year do neat people waste in cleaning their desks? I’ll bet it’s more like 60 weeks, which is an awful lot of time to waste in one year.

As you might be able to tell, I’m bitter about this. I am a person with a chronically messy desk. I frankly see this latest statistic as just more clean-desk propaganda, designed to make us feel guilty or inferior. We already feel guilty enough, just looking at our desks every day.

Well, here’s something else that the neat-desk brigade doesn’t want you to know. Maybe we spend six weeks a year searching for things, but at least we always find what we’re looking for. We know it’s on our desks somewhere; it’s just a question of how deep.

Neat desk people, on the other hand, don’t have to search nearly as long, only because the cold realization strikes within seconds: They’ve thrown it in the trash.

Whatever they’re looking for, it’s gone. Auf wiedersehen, pardner. Sayonara, baby.

You see, that’s what happens to obsessively neat people. They clean off their little desks, proudly dumping everything that resembles clutter into their little trash can (which they probably scrub with Lysol twice a week), and then the next day Filbert the comptroller comes by and asks them to hand over last week’s expense account receipts. They look down at their gleaming desks and croak forlornly, “I don’t have them available at this particular point in time.”

“You don’t WHAT!?” Filbert bellows like an enraged walrus, which is not a particularly easy thing for Filbert to do, since Filbert is a 98-pound woman.

“I have thrown them away,” the neat desk people whisper in a tiny voice, knowing that these are the last words they will ever whisper in that particular corporate conglomerate.

We messy desk people, on the other hand, can always just say, “I’ve got last week’s receipts right in this pile. Actually, I’m sure I also have June 1982’s receipts right in this pile. I’ll bring them over as soon as I can excavate them.”

Of course, “as soon as I can excavate them” may very well be next Tuesday, depending on the depth of the pile. But the point is, they’re there.

The clean desk people will argue that they don’t always just throw stuff away. They also file stuff. They file obsessively and compulsively, although this is not a huge improvement over throwing it away.

That’s because they end up with 8,000 files, indexed alphabetically, which is worse than just leaving everything in a pile on their desks, because they will never in a thousand years remember that they have filed a memo about the Oregon kite market under the letter W, for wind-driven aeronautical devices, West coast, string-dependent. They might as well have dumped it in the company Dumpster, which is what they do with most of the stuff that doesn’t fit neatly in a file folder, a category that almost always turns out to be synonymous with stuff they might actually need someday.

Now, we messy desk people also file stuff. We have one big file labeled “Stuff We Might Actually Need Someday,” and it fills up most of one filing cabinet. We keep this for about six years and then we throw it out, figuring, correctly, that anything we really need is piled on top of our desks anyway.

People are always amazed that we can find anything on our desks, but the truth is, our desks are more organized than they appear. What looks like one big pile is actually four or five big piles, each with a distinct character that only we are privy to. On my desk, the piles are titled something like, “Things I need to get to right away,” “Things I need to get to right away, but probably won’t,” “Things I have no idea what to do with,” and “Things that probably should be thrown away except I never throw anything away.”

It’s this last pile that makes our system vastly superior to the neatniks’ system. I usually find old receipts in this pile, thus saving me from enduring the most horrific of corporate fates, the fury of Filbert.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jim Kershner The Spokesman-Review