In praise of clutter The Economist Dec 19th 2002

Leave my desk alone. It works

ON THE six square feet next to the computer on which this article is being
written, a complex ecology has developed. There are approximately (it is
impossible to be precise without disturbing the natural order) 100 assorted
print-outs (e-mails, web pages, newspaper articles), 12 books, ten academic
articles, six pamphlets, five notebooks, three newspapers, two magazines,
two faxes, two telephone books, one file containing further faxes and
print-outs, six pens, one box of matches, one key (origin unknown) and one
handheld organiser. Some of this is being used in the writing of this
article. Some of it will be used in the writing of future articles. Some of
it will never be used at all, but will eventually, when the reason why this
correspondent originally thought it so interesting has faded, be thrown in
the bin.

This desk is not unusual in The Economist's editorial offices-just one
particular sort of habitat in a rich and variedlandscape. The deputy
editor's office, for example, contains roughly 700 books (he just got rid
of another 400). The defence correspondent has a charming mural patchwork
of telephone numbers, e-mail print-outs, press releases and religious
iconography. The economics correspondent's in-tray is two-and-a-half feet
(76 centimetres) high-in two piles, for stability.

The inhabitants of these offices seem perfectly happy in their
surroundings, and are mostly left alone to adapt the environment to their
convenience. The editorial floors of The Economist's offices are treated
somewhat like a nature reserve, where strange beasts roam and browse at
will, undisturbed by the fads and fancies that sweep through the rest of
business life. Others are not so lucky.

Clutterphobia

Many companies these days-United Parcel Service and General Motors in
America, for instance, and Asda, a supermarket chain in Britain-run "clean
desk" policies, requiring employees to remove all evidence of work from
their desks by the end of the day. The reason given is usually
security-that burglars will be less likely to find anything interesting if
it is put away-but that is a poor excuse. Any self-respecting burglar can
pick the lock of a filing cabinet, and will be far more likely to find what
he is looking for in a methodical office than in one whose logic is
comprehensible only to its creator.

The real reason is more likely to be the common hostility to "clutter",
which managers tend to regard as an obstacle, rather than an aid, to work.
Although office clutter is usually almost entirely work-related, it tends
nevertheless to be treated as though it consisted of the dirty socks and
crisp packets of an adolescent. Workers are confused. They know that
creating clutter is an essential part of the way they work, but they are
made to feel guilty about it.

There are plenty of parasites who make a living out of this confusion.
Jeffrey Mayer, for instance, exhorts people to "Get rid of the clutter!
Save time! Become more productive!" in his book "Winning the Fight Between
You and Your Desk". The book is endorsed by Barry Greenberg, president of
Chemex Industries: no doubt the Chrome Finish Autoflush Valve for Urinals
and Toilets, advertised as his most exciting new product on his website,
has benefited from the insights in this oeuvre. Donald Wetmore of the
Productivity Institute, a company that purports to help people become more
productive, cites the "messy desk" as one of the "Top Five Management
Mistakes" and maintains that "studies [which studies? Citations, please]
have shown that the person who works with a messy desk spends on average
one-and-a-half hours a day looking for things or being distracted by things."

During the 1990s, technological change lent authority to the familiar
prejudice against clutter. Clutter, after all, was paper, and paper was
old-fashioned. Paper has no memory; paper cannot be networked. As digital
devices began to talk to each other, as computers of different sizes and
shapes with different purposes proliferated, the persistent popularity of a
means of communication that had been around for 6,000 years became
increasingly irritating to the guardians of the Zeitgeist.

Some of the digital age's finest thinkers set about burying paper. Paul
Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, California,
explained in "The Electronic Pinata: A Paperless Future is Waiting in the
Wings" in 1992, that "paper is well on its way to becoming a metaphor", in
the sense that the screen and stylus of a handheld organiser mimic notebook
and pencil, "rather than a medium". "Digital paper and sushi computers
[ones you can roll up]", he wrote, "will become business realities after
this decade is over."

The tyranny of the tidy

It is fortunate for contemporary prophets that most of their predictions
are as swiftly forgotten as made, for paper, while it may be used in a
metaphorical sense by the electronics industry, has also remained
stubbornly literal. The more digital information sped around the world, the
more people wanted to print it out. From 1992 to 2002, world consumption of
paper and board products grew from 250m tonnes to 325m.

Insecurity, said the visionaries: children clutching on to familiar objects
as the world accelerates past them. As the value of tech stocks rose,
bosses became increasingly determined to prove that they "got it". One way
of demonstrating that they were truly wired was to espouse the paperless
vision.

A few of them tried to impose the vision on their employees. The most
dramatic of these experiments took place at the offices of Chiat/Day, an
American advertising agency. In 1993, Jay Chiat, the boss, had a revelation
while on the ski slopes, and realised that his employees' minds were
trapped by the boxes they were working in. Free their bodies from the box
and you would free their minds. They were, accordingly, installed in
offices without desks or filing cabinets. There were sofas to sit on and a
few special rooms for meetings. There was nowhere to keep any paper;
indeed, nobody was supposed to keep paper.

Chiat/Day's employees behaved like any group of refugees torn from familiar
surroundings. They tried to rebuild their world. One woman bought a child's
red wagon, put her paper files in it and trailed it around the corridors
after her. Most people recreated their desks in the boots of their cars,
where they stored their files and notebooks, dashing in and out of the
building to the parking lot during meetings. Groups of workers took
permanent control of meeting rooms and a shanty-town of desks grew up. The
company was eventually bought by a traditionalist rival and normal life
resumed.

The public sector got the bug too, though rather later. Panting along
behind the curve, the British government committed £200m (then $290m) in
2001 to developing a paperless school. Baroness Ashton of Upholland,
launching the scheme, waved a paper and pencil around, predicting their
eventual demise .

The revenge of the trees

In most quarters, however, the fate of the tech stocks has taken the shine
off those futuristic visions. The world is kinder to the past, these days,
and to tools that have proved their value over millennia. A sign of the
times is the publication of an excellent book* by Richard Harper and
Abigail Sellen which details the many virtues of paper and the many
workplaces in which it remains surprisingly important.

Air-traffic control, for example, does not, at first glance, seem a likely
candidate. The business of monitoring incoming aircraft and predicting
their future course, which depends on measurement and mathematics, sounds
as though it should be entirely electronic. Yet paper remains an essential
part of the air-traffic control system in Britain.

Each air-traffic controller works in a team of about five staff.
Information about each incoming plane in that controller's sector is
printed out on a piece of paper-a flight progress strip, about eight inches
long and an inch deep. As the plane moves across the controller's sector,
the strip is annotated-with, for instance, speed or altitude changes. On
the basis of those annotations, different team members can do their
job-working out, for instance, the implications of those changes for the
next sector. In a busy sector, one team may have 50 strips on display.

Many attempts have been made to get rid of the flight progress strips. The
only way of doing away with them, it turns out, is to give air-traffic
controllers smaller areas to cover. For larger areas-which means a more
complex job-the paper strips are essential. "They are a jolly efficient
means of annotating information," says Richard Wright of Britain's National
Air Traffic Services. "The controllers can read them at a glance. If we
replace them it will have to be with something better. They will be with us
for some time yet."

Paper's importance to the air-traffic controllers illustrates some of the
reasons why it survives. It can be annotated more easily than text on a
screen can; those marks can be seen more easily by several people than can
digits on a screen; and it can be moved around, thus conveying more
information.

It is less surprising, perhaps, that the International Monetary Fund, which
Mr Harper and Ms Sellen also spent some time studying, should still use a
certain amount of paper. But, given how technology-rich the Fund is-it had
spent over $70m on IT in five years at the time of their study, and was
spending $18,000 per head per year-its reliance on paper is somewhat
unexpected. The 25 workers (16 economists, seven administrative workers and
two research assistants) whom Mr Harper and Ms Sellen studied spent 97% of
their time working on documents of some sort; of that, 86% of the time was
spent working on paper. They liked paper because they could spread it
around; because they could annotate colleagues' work without interfering
with the text, as they would if they annotated electronically; and because
paper interfered less with communication during a meeting than screens would.

In order to observe the differential impact of paper and computers on how
people work, Mr Harper and Ms Sellen set up an experiment with ten people,
five of them using paper and pens, five of them using screens only. Their
task was to summarise a number of reports.

The people working with paper spread out all the reports on a desk, flicked
through them, annotated them, moving easily from one to the other. The
people working on computers struggled to do something similar, creating a
number of windows on their screen. They found navigation-scrolling,
clicking and dragging-slow and cumbersome, and several of them got quite
cross. One started shouting at his computer.

A beautiful mind

But why do people need to spread papers around on their desks? Why don't
they just read their paperwork and file it? Alison Kidd, a psychologist,
investigated this question while working for Hewlett-Packard Laboratories.
Ms Kidd, whose new firm, The Prospectory, helps companies to use technology
to develop new ideas, interviewed 12 workers about how they used
information, paper and computers.

Her paper, "The Marks are on the Knowledge Worker", draws a distinction
between "knowledge workers" and other categories, such as clerical workers.
Clerical workers use information-about, say, customer orders-to aid the
smooth working of the company. Knowledge workers use information to change
themselves. So, for instance, knowledge workers take notes not in order to
store information, but because the process of note-taking helps them to
learn. Once taken, notes are rarely reviewed. According to a study of
research workers reported in "The Technology of Team Navigation", a paper
by Edwin Hutchins, a psychologist, while 64% kept their notes for years,
44% hardly ever referred to them.

The relationship between workers and their clutter is similar. People
spread stuff over their desks not because they are too lazy to file it, but
because the paper serves as a physical representation of what is going on
in their heads-"a temporary holding pattern for ideas and inputs which they
cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use", as Ms Kidd puts
it. The clutter cannot be filed because it has not been categorised. By the
time the worker's ideas have taken form, and the clutter could be
categorised, it has served its purpose and can therefore be binned. Filing
it is a waste of time.

Why people need a physical map of what is going on in their heads is not
clear. Ms Kidd suggests that the brain may just need some help. She speaks
of her father, who suffers from frontal-lobe dementia, which affects the
ability to interpret what is going on around one. As his brain has
deteriorated, "he uses the physical correlate more than ever", to the point
at which his surroundings have become chaotic. So perhaps, as the tidy have
always suspected, they are just smarter: they can do more stuff in their
heads without outside help than the untidy can.

Filers versus pilers

Work by Steve Whittaker and Julia Hirschberg of ATT Labs-Research, however,
suggests that clutter may actually be quite an efficient organising
principle. In "The Character, Value and Management of Personal Paper
Archives", they examine the distinction that MIT's Tom Malone draws between
"filers" and "pilers". When filers receive paperwork, they put it away.
When pilers get it, they leave it on the desk-not randomly, but in
concentric circles. There is a "hot" area, of stuff that the worker is
dealing with right now. There is a "warm" area, of stuff that needs to be
got through in the next few days: it may be there, in part, as a prompt.
And there is a "cold" area, at the edges of the desk, of stuff which could
just as well be in an archive (or, often, the bin).

According to Mr Whittaker and Ms Hirschberg, the assumption that filers can
find stuff more quickly is wrong. Filers, they say, "are less likely to
access a given piece of data, and more likely to acquire extraneous
data...In moderation, piling has the benefits of providing somewhat ready
access to materials as well as reminding about tasks currently in
progress." Filers have two problems finding stuff: they tend to file too
much, because they have put so much effort into building a filing system,
and they often find it hard to remember how they categorised things.

As well as giving much-needed succour to those attached to the ecology of
their desktops, these studies have some serious implications for managers.
If they interfere with people's desktops, they may also interfere with
their thinking. Trying to force workers to get rid of clutter and scan
their papers into a computer system may be an expensive waste of time.
Companies which do this may find that they create large, useless databases
full of information that nobody ever uses.

By trying to computerise everything, managers may undermine the process
they should be trying to support. There is a good example of this in the
book by Mr Harper and Ms Sellen. A British telecoms-equipment manufacturer
decided to computerise its salesmen's paperwork so that, rather than
lugging files all over the country, they could plug into a database, and so
that people back at base could also have access to this information.

The technical side of the project went well. However, the information that
salesmen put into the database was vague to the point of uselessness. The
problem was that the nature of the salesmen's files had been misunderstood.
Managers had thought that salesmen relied on detailed notes about the
nature of the customer's organisation and its likely requirements.
Actually, the important information was about people in the client
companies-their hobbies and interests, their personal characteristics, and
about who to avoid dealing with. It wasn't stuff that the salesmen wanted
to put on a database.

Britain's policemen had a similar experience. Chivvied by the Home Office
to become more efficient (which is always assumed to mean more electronic),
police forces issued constables with laptop computers to carry around with
them, for instance, to take statements from witnesses to crimes. They found
that the quality of the statements deteriorated. Writing into a computer,
they discovered, gets in the way of talking to somebody. That is why you
will never be interviewed by a journalist typing his notes into a computer.
They want to look you in the eye.

Automation can achieve so much in so many areas of work that managers are
tempted to think they can automate everything. But the most important
aspects of work are the hardest to automate. "Businesses", says Mr Harper,
whose company, Appliance Studio, helps companies to design computer-based
tools to work with, rather than against, workers, "must take care not to
throw the baby out with the bathwater." Computers are fine, in their place;
but their proper place is at the edge of a healthy distribution of clutter.	


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