I had no idea that my reviews of books on cleaning and tidying was going to become a series. Three makes a series. right? This one though, advocates for mess. I am on board for this message.
Eric Abrahamson is a professor of management at Columbia University and David Freeman is a journalist and author. While they do talk some about mess in the home, their hearts are really in mess in business and the office. This is not a book that tells you how to be strategically messy, it does tell you why you should be strategically messy.
As I said in the previous reviews, I help people clean and organize AND I don’t care how neat or messy you keep your house. Like Abrahamson and Freedman, I am well aware that there is a billion dollar industry that has grown up around organization and storage. You should not trust any industry that makes billions of dollars off your culturally driven insecurities – organization, wellness (diet, fitness, beauty) and wealth (mlms, wealth management, all those courses that teach people how to become rich). They will never allow us to be enough. We will always fall short because if we stop needing their help, they stop making money.
It should be noted that this book was published in 2006. It has an ode to “rising political star” Arnold Schwarzenegger that has not aged well. Ignore that part. The book starts off at a national conference for professional organizers. They make it very clear that organization is a fast growing industry and it is designed to use your insecurities to sell you services and stuff. From there they wander through some case studies and features some experts on why a certain amount of mess and disorganization is more beneficial than harmful. They also talk about the flip side – why too much organization and neatness is far more harmful than beneficial. Some of the points they make are:
- our society takes an unnecessarily dim view of mess and judges people for mess
- our world, the universe, and our brains are naturally messy and contain a certain amount of disorder
- neatness and organization are time consuming and may require unneeded labor costs
- the disorder we create in our work spaces very often has a logic that allows us to work more productively
- for a variety of reasons, mess promoted productivity and creativity
- children learn better and perform better with a degree of mess and disorder
- a certain amount of mess and disorganization allows your enterprise to adapt quickly to changing trends
- our personal messes reflect who we are as individuals and eliminating them strips us of our personality
I had an strong emotional reaction when they were talking about the persistence of the “clean desk” policy in work places. Years ago, I went to law school to make the world a better place. I discovered that I was unsuited for the particular area I had planned to study – human rights (weak stomach). I ended up working for a mental health association managing a small, controversial advocacy agenda. I loved it and I was good at it. My workplace became increasingly toxic and I ended up burning out, going to massage therapy school and working in a bakery. One of the points of contention was my messy desk. I dislike wasting my time on cosmetic things that are done purely to meet an unrealistic and arbitrary standard. It was hardly the only problem, and the head of my department, Dr. Nuss Rewman (not his real name) was hardly my only antagonist, but the conflict over my desk exacerbated all of the other toxic issues, drained my motivation and ground me down. I have not worked in an office since. As a purely personal aside, I should thank Dr. Rewman for making working for him so unpleasant. I have learned that there was some deeply fucked up stuff going on at that place and if I had been in better graces with Dr. Rewman, I might have gotten sucked into it*.
One of the things that Abrahamson and Freedman allude to, but don’t dive into, is the gendered nature of judgement about mess and disorganization. They do follow an appointment between a professional organizer and client. The client is a successful woman and it is hinted at that her failure to keep a clean and tidy house is causing marital strife. The husband is no where to be found during the appointment. Viewers of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo will recognize the pattern of both the husband and the wife blaming the wife for the mess while also discovering that the husband isn’t exactly the patron saint of throwing things away.
One of the reasons I appreciated Marie Kondo’s book was because it focused on the individual creating a space filled with the things that brought them joy. I liked Rachel Hoffman’s Unfuck Your Habitat method because it doesn’t insist on a spotless house at all times and strongly recommends that you limit your cleaning time commitment. Abrahamson and Freedman back up a lot of my personal feelings about not getting wrapped up in shame about mess. Mess is fine. Relax. You have better things to do with your time.
One final anecdote – A woman contacted me about helping her daughter clean and organize her room because her daughter wasn’t getting her homework done and she blamed the room. I met with them in their home and asked the daughter to take me to her room without the mother. The room was messy. I asked the daughter to tell me about her room. As she explained, it was clear to me that the room was organized, just messy. I asked the daughter why she thought she wasn’t getting her homework done. She said she and her mom fought so much about the room that she hated being at home, so she hung out with her friends instead. I asked the mom to come into the room and I explained her daughter’s organization to her. After some compromises about keeping dirty dishes out of the room and dirty laundry in baskets, she agreed to let go of the perfectly neat room she envisioned for her daughter. Her daughter agreed to spend less time with friends. I worked with the daughter for the rest of the school year, helping her learn to organize big homework projects. She graduated from high school on time and I feel better about that first hour long meeting than I do about my decade working for the mental health group.
