Bless This Messy Desk
By Jim Calloway, Director, OBA Management Assistance Program

In some ways, opinions about general tidiness or messiness of your desk can be as divisive as any of today’s great political issues. Those who tend to keep a tidy desk have a difficult time restraining themselves from commenting when they see another lawyer’s desk containing piles of paperwork. By the same token, many other lawyers see a lawyer’s desk with all of the desktop wood exposed and tend to think there may be something a little bit wrong with that person.

Riding to the rescue of the messy desk crew is a recent book titled A Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahamson and David W. Friedman (2006). In this book, the authors deliver the counterpoints to all of the rules promulgated by the time management experts and the rapidly growing community of professional organizers. Messy workspaces, they argue, may not be all that bad.

Certainly our society tends to look down on people with messy desks. They are thought to be slovenly, disorganized and less productive than others. You really cannot imagine the president of the United States delivering a nationally-televised address behind a desk with an overflowing inbox, a stack of a dozen file folders, a few dozen strategically-placed Post-it notes and the leftovers from lunch. (Of course, many of you are probably thinking that if you had as many staff people working for you as the president does, your desk would be clean, too.)

A story in USA Today quoted an individual as saying that there were “uncountable hours lost each year” due to disorganization.1 But, have you ever noticed that the individuals giving those quotes to the media are almost all professional organizers? These people make their living from convincing others that they need to pay these people to clean their desks, shelves and cabinets.

Does a messy desk really equate to disorganization? Not so, according to the authors of A Perfect Mess.

“A messy desk can be a highly effective prioritizing and accessing system…. In general, on the messy desk, the more important, more urgent work tends to stay close by and near the top of the clutter, while the safely ignorable stuff tends to get buried at the bottom or near the back, which makes perfect sense.”2

So maybe the views of messy desks critics are not correct at all, but are merely the “neatnicks” way of stifling the impressive creative power of the “messies.”

A survey from Ajilon Office says messiness increases with increasing education, increasing salary and increasing experience. In fact, survey results found that “[t]he higher the salary, the messier the person: 66 percent of Americans making $35,000 or less per year are self-described ‘neat freaks,’ whereas only 11 percent of those earning above $75,000 claim the same.”3 The idea that people with messy desks make more money would certainly resonate with many of us.

You may recall that Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin accidentally when he returned to his cluttered office after being out for several days and found something unusual in a petri dish. Even the staunchest proponent of the messy desk would probably have to concede that when items on a lawyer’s desk start growing mold, it is time for a reevaluation of your methods.

One of my personal challenges is dealing with the huge amount of new information that is available each month on technology and management. As I am preparing this article, a significant component of the mess on my desk is magazines open to half-read articles. A few bookmarks could obviously resolve that part of the mess. But what I would really like is to find time to finish the reading.

I think that’s really the cause of most of the messy desks. If we had an unlimited amount of time, we would probably be happy to neatly file everything in its place. In real life, however, one sometimes tends to find themselves rushing from one filing deadline to one court appearance back to one client appointment. Most of the mess is actually things that are uncompleted items. Rather than filing them somewhere, we just want to finish the work.

(I have also noticed that those of us with messy desks may also have messy Windows Desktops. That may become a topic for an entirely different article.)

Unfortunately, it is not within my power to grant absolution to those of you with messy desks. First of all, disorganization within the law office is not a good thing. I am willing to concede that not all desks that appear to be messy are truly evidence of disorganization. But we have to be honest and admit that some messy desks are a symptom of greater problems.

Secondly, as lawyers we want to develop broad client bases, representing people from all walks of life. While potential clients belonging to the “messy” persuasion may be quite content to be represented by a “neatnik” lawyer, the reverse is often not true. You would really hate to lose the opportunity for the most lucrative case of the year just because the client happened to schedule the initial meeting during an extra messy period.

I am aware that some habitually messy lawyers have found an easy solution to this problem. They just maintain two offices. One is for work and can become extremely cluttered. The other is the “client interview office” where things are kept very neat and orderly. While this may seem to be a bit extreme, I guess it is better than losing the business altogether.

Since I am a frequent sufferer of Messy Desk Syndrome, I am perhaps not the best source of assistance on this topic. But since you’ve already invested close to half of a billable hour in reading this far, here are a few ideas.

1 If you only have an inbox and outbox on your desk, perhaps you could appear a little better organized (and maybe even become so) by adding a couple of extra boxes for papers. One could be called “Pending” and the other “Urgent.”

I know from experience that one of the primary reasons why we keep things on our desk is that we are fearful we will forget about the task that needs to be done if we move them out of sight. A pile of papers or files stacked in a box appears more organized, making us and our office visitors feel better. Prioritizing certain things as pending and others as urgent is actually a very effective and useful management technique.

2 Work from the lists, not from files. Keeping a list of all current projects and assignments is a key step toward organization and allowing you to move some of those file folders off of your desk and back into the file cabinets. Many readers right now have a file on their desk for no other reason than to remind them to make a telephone call. Write down the name, the number and the reason for the call on your to do list and let the file find its way back to the file cabinet.

3 Implement practice management software. I know that this may begin to sound like a broken record from me for some of you. But the more information that you keep on your computer system, the less physical bits of paper you will have cluttering up your desk. There are now many lawyers who scan all of the paper that comes into their office and largely worked from virtual files on their computer systems. While this is a great idea, the most important part of the idea is that it the information that is normally contained on calendars, Rolodexes, 3 x 5 cards, Post-it notes and other scraps of paper is all maintained within your practice management system. Do that as a first priority and make the final conversion to the paperless office a future goal.

Just remember the lessons from the book. The appearance of messiness may not be a bad thing. The issue is how organized you are and how well your office systems function. If everything is moving along smoothly, then feel free to tell the next person who comments on your messy desk, “By the way, did you know that we make more money than you do?”

1. USA Today, Jan. 22, 2006 Consequences of Messy Desks http://tinyurl.com/22u6tb
2. A Perfect Mess page 30
3. What Does Your Desk Say About You? Are You A “Neat Freak” Or A “Clutter Bug” At The Office? www.ajilonoffice.com http://tinyurl.com/2asxfp

Originally published in the Oklahoma Bar Journal Feb. 10, 2007 - Vol. 78; No.06