Clutter takes over
It was the week after we finally moved in together. I was standing in the kitchen with an incoherent box of odds and sods, exhausted from trying to make sense of them, when my long-time sweetheart emerged from the basement with yet another item that required a home. “Where does this go?” he asked innocently. And it hit me with inescapable certainty, a long, slow sinking feeling: By this point in my life, I’m supposed to know where things go. And I don’t.
I’ve never been organized, although I’ve had my moments. I scrub enthusiastically when it’s required and I’m even good at getting rid of things. But when my house is at its tidiest, my productivity in other spheres plummets. Even though I long for the gorgeously spare homes featured in glossy magazines, I find the execution taxing. Being neat requires an investment of time and emotional energy — time I’d rather spend doing the very things that being organized is supposed to allow me to do.
So when David Freedman and Eric Abrahamson’s book on the usefulness of disorder, A Perfect Mess, appeared in 2007, I found it immediately appealing, right down to its sprawling subtitle: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder — How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place. No one else seemed to be asking whether or not neatness actually made people function better. I decided to call Freedman.
“People assume their lives are out of control because they’ve been told their entire lives that things will go poorly if they’re disorganized,” he tells me in his languid Boston accent. He’s used to being a voice in the wilderness in our clutter-phobic society. The bad news? Most of us will never be highly organized, even if we aspire to be. Professional organizers make repeat visits because, as Freedman explains, most people just don’t find that being organized comes naturally.
Oh, the shame
Although Freedman’s research showed that both men and women worry about messiness, women responding to his survey had stronger feelings of guilt and shame about their shortcomings. A recent issue of Real Simple, the bible of organizational obsessives everywhere, urges its readers to address visual clutter — even as one of the women profiled worries her decluttering habit will make her too cranky to enjoy life. She might be surprised by Freedman’s discovery that being organized doesn’t improve efficiency. “If you look at the evidence, there isn’t a strong correlation between being neat and being effective,” he tells me cheerfully.
Talk to professional organizers, however, and you’ll get a different story. Vancouver-based Rowena List has been a professional organizer for five years. She believes strongly in the transformative powers of space clearing. Like the American motivational speakers she admires — Suze Orman, Tony Robbins — her pitch is well oiled. “We’re running on that treadmill of life,” says List, “and not really asking ourselves, ‘Wait, what do I want? What are my aspirations and intentions?’” She says we get emotionally attached to our possessions, which become stand-ins for our dreams and desires. When we clear our junk, we make room to actualize that potential. “It’s like putting on a really great outfit,” List says. “I work with my clients on their outside because I know it will help them feel good on the inside.”
