My book group once held a meeting where each of us confessed to our secret guilty reading pleasures. Some members admitted addiction to trashy romance novels, others had a hidden penchant for murder mysteries. One spoke of the private pleasures of perusing cookbooks in bed. I owned up to my clandestine collection of books on how to get organized.

An entire shelf, gentle reader: Totally Organized, Get a Grip!, Confessions of an Organized Family, Clutter's Last Stand, The Organized Parent, Ten-Minute Clutter Control, 12 Steps to Becoming a More Organized Mom, Simplify Your Life: Get Organized and Stay That Way, How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life--I'll spare you the entire catalog. Just let me assure you that most of these books had never been cracked. They simply leaned against each other in their bright and bossy dust jackets and promised me that one day I would get it all together.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of neatness
Now I know that I was not alone in my secret shame. According to Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman, authors of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, "The unpleasant feeling that each of us should be more organized, better organized, or differently organized seems nearly ubiquitous." They conducted a national survey in which two-thirds of the respondents said they felt ashamed of how disorganized they are.

These guilt-ridden souls are not just buying books, either. They're spending billions of dollars a year on home organization products and professional organizers. In fact, as I write this, it is January, the National Association of Professional Organizers' self-declared Get Organized Month, and over 4,000 NAPO members are gearing up for a national campaign dedicated to "raising awareness of the benefits of getting organized and of hiring a professional organizer." Their goal is to help over 10,000 chronically disordered people reform before January 31.

Meanwhile, the $6.9 billion U.S. home organization product industry is expected to grow to $8.6 billion by 2011, as aging Baby Boomers seek to organize their empty nests and their children move into dorm rooms and apartments severely lacking in places to stash their stuff. Last year alone, Americans spent $2.5 billion on bins, baskets, and totes. I can't help but wonder where people are putting all these things and if we won't start to need products that help us organize our organizers.

The hidden costs of neatness
Wasted dollars are not the only costs of our national obsession with neatness. The pursuit of order also drains us emotionally as we berate ourselves, our spouses, our children, and our employees over messy kitchens, bedrooms, and desks. And yet, life is inherently messy, and the only neat family room is a family-less room. Irwin Kula, author of Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life, writes: "We secretly want the kitchen to finally be clean. And yet if the kitchen was always clean, there would be no meals."

There is a time cost to organization, too. As Abrahamson and Freedman point out, "It takes extra effort to neaten up a system. Things don't generally neaten up themselves." And the time spent neatening is often wasted, since an organized environment is not necessarily a productive one. For example, the authors' survey found that people who said they kept a "very neat" desk spent an average of 36 percent more time looking for things than did people who admitted to having a "fairly messy" one.

In fact, there's some evidence to suggest that excessive orderliness may cost you in terms of promotability. A recent study of the work styles of hundreds of CEOs found that company heads were significantly less organized than their subordinates. Another survey found a correlation between messiness and salary levels: 66 percent of Americans making $35,000 or less per year describe themselves as "neat freaks," while only 11 percent of those making over $75,000/year claim the same.

This is your brain on . . . your desk
Cognitive scientists have theories about why messy is sometimes more productive than neat. Psychologist Alison Kidd suggests that piles of paper and other objects arrayed on a desk or other surface may represent ideas that people "cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use."

Observational studies find that people who file away their papers tend to amass more information of questionable value and to access their documents less frequently than people who pile their information on desktops and other surfaces. In their zeal to keep their desktops pristine, neat freaks often archive information before they are sure it is something they need to keep and before they know how and when they might use it. Without a clear idea of why they might eventually access documents, filers tend to categorize them in ways that later make it difficult to retrieve them.

Pilers, on the other hand, seem to have easier access to information they need because frequently used documents tend to move to the tops of their piles, while less relevant material moves down and is eventually discarded.

To learn more about office workers' conscious and unconscious strategies for storing and retrieving information, Herman Miller commissioned an in-depth study of 25 "Work Masters"--people identified by their employers as exceptional workers. It turns out that all of these MVPs are pilers rather than filers who subscribe wholeheartedly to the old adage "out of sight is out of mind." The study subjects use piles in a variety of ways (e.g., to represent multiple projects or different stages of a single project, or to indicate time period or type of activity), but the arrangement of the piles on desktops or other surfaces is significant to their users. "For our study participants," the researchers write, "piles are a normal aspect of a visual organization system. The placement on the work surface, where a pile is located, is as important as what the pile contains or represents."

The Work Masters study concludes that knowledge workers who are really good at what they do want to be able to see their work. The piles on their surfaces serve as visual reminders of "what they are working on now, what they worked on previously, and what they need to work on tomorrow."

Mess and creativity
Think about it: neatness is almost never the mother of invention. A petri dish left by an open window led to the discovery of penicillin. Life itself emerged from a murky primordial soup. The most innovative thinking, art, music, or poetry comes not out of formulaic procedures but out of the juxtaposition of two previously unrelated concepts, rhythms, objects, words. In fact, the purposeful injection of randomness--another word for mess--is an often recommended method for breaking out of a creative block or rut.

Theoretical physicist David Deutsch works in a decidedly messy environment that allows him to switch seamlessly from one project to another as his mind leads him. In an online interview he explains that a tidy environment would require him to know what he was going to think about next, something that would be "very expensive in both time and effort."

In sum, a bit more messiness can save you money and free up your time, your psyche, and your imagination. If disorderliness does not come as naturally to you as it does to me, here are some ideas to mess you up a little.

Deschedule. How much time are you spending fiddling with your Blackberry or organizing your planner? Might that time be better spent playing a video game with your kid or, um, sleeping? Consider loosening up your schedule, to leave room for the unexpected. "Being open to a certain level of randomness," write Abrahamson and Freedman, "allows it to work in your favor."

Embrace distraction. Or at least redefine it. As Deutsch puts it, the paper that you come across accidentally is often more important than the one you started out looking for. "Scientific progress is very untidy and involves lots of back-tracking, and it often involves going in a direction which one would have thought irrelevant. Being 'distracted' is actually part of the very stuff of discovery, provided that one is distracted by things that seem to make sense."

Make like a Meanderthal. An artist friend who owns a gallery and frame shop calls his non-linear approach to the work day meanderthaling. "Wash two dishes, answer three emails, frame two paintings, wash another dish, start a load of laundry, hang some art in gallery, return two phone calls. Much gets accomplished overall, though in what would appear to the outside observer as a randomly chaotic, disjointed (some would say dysfunctional) fashion."

Do what comes naturally. Take a tip from the Work Masters and pile, don't file. For a more radical approach, try the volcano method of material organization. Keep one large pile of papers on your desk. Anything that is important will be retrieved and thrown back on the pile often, and will slide like lava down the outside of the pile. In this way, all your important papers collect around the rim of the volcano, while the less useful stuff is buried inside. Neat, huh?

Writer Debra Wierenga is developing a self-help book for the chronically organized.