You Need to Get to Work!

Steffany Mohan needs to be organized. The dentist from Des Moines, Iowa, runs her own practice, as well as a school for dental assistants on the side. She has three children under 8—and is expecting her fourth in a few weeks. Her husband is a busy surgeon. Not surprisingly, her desk is a jumble of in-process items. Her to-do list appears endless, and she's constantly struggling to make headway. So last month Mohan flew in productivity consultant Barbara Hemphill from North Carolina for a two-day intervention. Together they purged her office of unnecessary clutter, set up a system of file folders and discussed strategies that would allow Mohan to make decisions more quickly. Not only is Mohan's desk spotless, but her files are so organized she can delegate more work to her assistant. The cost of Hemphill's consultation: $5,000. "It was outrageously worth it," says Mohan.

In offices across America, we seem to be at a moment of get-organized-now hysteria. Time-management gurus have been preaching their work-more-efficiently systems since the days of Benjamin Franklin ("Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions"). But more people are searching for new techniques to speed through tasks. In the electronic, gadgetized age of e-mail, BlackBerrys and ever-more-sophisticated desktop software—all designed theoretically to manage digital information efficiently—we've become overwhelmed. That's where the productivity industry comes in. The question is, however, whether this newfound emphasis on productivity is helping—or just making us crazier.

A new and highly publicized book, "A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder," actually argues in favor of chaos. Coauthors Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman write that neatness has become wildly overrated. The authors cite successful book and hardware stores with no rhyme or reason to the layout of merchandise, as well as inventors and scientists whose big breakthroughs came because of nonsystematic, improvisational experimenting. In one anecdote, Abrahamson and Freedman describe a worker who became so focused on getting organized that he lost sight of actually doing work. He told the authors: "I used to spend an hour each day planning out my day on an Excel spreadsheet, until my boss told me I was spending too much time on it."

There's no single statistic that illustrates the increased focus on productivity, but lots of anecdotal data points. Attendance at time-management seminars is rising. Tech companies like Microsoft say customers are demanding new tricks to help them work smarter. Sales at the Container Store, which sells organizational gear, have been growing by 18 percent a year. Page views at Lifehacker .com, a popular productivity blog, hit 10.9 million in January, more than double its readership last summer. Membership in the National Association of Professional Organizers has grown from 2,542 in 2004 to nearly 4,000 today. Two productivity self-help books, David Allen's "Getting Things Done" and Stephen Covey's "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," remain in the top 10 on The Wall Street Journal's business best-seller list years after publication. Zack Edison, an Apple consultant in northern California, constantly hears colleagues exchanging efficiency techniques. "It's like everybody who's overweight is always talking about diets," he says.

Both buyers and sellers of this advice attribute its growing popularity to the same causes. Companies have downsized, piling more work on fewer employees. More people are self-employed or telecommuting, giving them more discretion over how to spend their time. Workplace distractions are epidemic—especially as e-mail, once a blessing, has turned into an endless time-suck. A few years ago, discussions of work-life balance focused mostly on programs like flex-time; today, workers realize that no matter how flexible their employers are, most of us still can't go home until our work is done. Adding to our woes: instead of creating new tools to help us, the tech world's biggest innovations of late have been wonderful distractions like YouTube.

Add these factors together, and it's no coincidence that the nation's rate of productivity growth has slowed lately, and economist Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com sees why when he considers his own work habits. Thanks to his BlackBerry, laptop and cell phone, his workdays are far longer now, but the demands still exceed the supply of time. "I just can't physically find another spare moment to do more, so I've reached the point where I need to ration what I do, or do what I do better," he says.