It's that time of year when Americans resolve to unclutter their lives and store the stuff they've accumulated in nifty containers that just happen to be on sale everywhere. January, the National Association of Professional Organizers tells us, is Get Organized Month.

Not so fast, say the authors of "A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder" (Little, Brown, $25.99). In their new book, Eric Abrahamson, a management professor at Columbia University, and David H. Freedman, technology columnist at Inc. magazine, argue that we'd all be better off worrying less about neatness and order.

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Albert Einstein, who appears to be looking for something in his Princeton office, has become the patron saint of the anti-anti-clutter movement.

WHAT MESSY CAN DO FOR YOU Being like Felix isn't always better than being like Oscar, author David Freedman says. Robert Altman: The late director was famous for improvising on the set. Bill Gates: The Microsoft founder sends independent R&D teams in conflicting directions. Arnold Schwarzenegger: The California governor hates making appointments and has pretty much winged his whole career. And if it's neat you want ... history's ultimate neat freak: Adolf Hitler.

Freedman talked about the wisdom of tolerating mess from his "moderately messy" home outside Boston.

What's wrong with being neat?

There isn't anything wrong with being neat. The real point is that people assume neater is always better, and that's just plain wrong. In some cases, moderately messier is better. If you're a naturally neat person, I don't see any reason to change. If, however, you're anxious about being neater or you feel other people are pushing you toward being neater, you're probably fine at the level of messiness you have.

In the book, you mention one of Atlanta's biggest companies, UPS, which expects workers to leave a clean desk at the end of the day. Why do you think that's a bad idea?

If you had to point to one thing that best symbolizes the counterproductivity of neatness and organization, it's the idea that people should keep a clean desk. It has been shown in numerous studies — and common sense backs it up — that people work best when they're allowed to keep their environment in the somewhat messy way they think and work. A messy desk is an amazingly effective work-flow system. You keep the stuff that's most important toward the front of the desk and on the top of piles, and the stuff that's less important ends up farther back and at the bottom. If you file things away all the time, you're not only taking time to file and retrieve and refile, but you're losing all this visual stimulation that tells you where you are in your work process.

Einstein didn't have a neat desk, did he?

Einstein had a fantastically messy desk. I spend a lot of time walking through the halls of academia, and I can tell you there's a strong correlation between how spectacular someone's mess is and how successful they are as a professor.

A lot of this book isn't just about clutter, is it? It's about the ways we try to deny the randomness and messiness of existence.

Yeah, a lot of the publicity so far has been on messy desks and clutter in the home, but there's something larger going on here. I came to this subject through a new scientific field that sprung up in the 1990s to study the way randomness makes systems more efficient. It's counterintuitive, but it's true.

You poke some fun at organizers. Is this a profession we really need?

I don't accuse professional organizers of causing this drive toward neatness. They're just answering cries for help. But when you see the way they've become media stars, the way they turn up on the "Today" show or "Oprah" and save people's lives, I think they're driving home this idea that the majority of us who are somewhat messy and disorganized are failing in some way. We've been made to feel that these extreme cases of people paralyzed with clutter are where we're all headed. That we all have this messiness sickness, and that these organizers are the doctors who are going to cure us. That's a terrible message that creates unnecessary anxiety in a large segment of the population.

Organizers sometimes claim that the average person spends an hour a day looking for stuff. Is there any basis for that?

I searched high and low and could find none. I label it an urban legend. We did a survey of 260 people — not a scientific survey, but a good cross section — and the average amount of time we found was nine minutes. The people who spent longer were the ones who said they kept a very neat desk. When you're filing everything away, sometimes it's harder to find things.

One of the best parts of the book is when you go with an organizer on an apartment makeover, and the client opens her shower stall, and a pile of organizing paraphernalia falls out.

[Laughs] Anecdotal evidence suggests that a lot of the stuff we're buying to organize our stuff is becoming part of the problem. People are filling their closets with racks and bins and baskets they buy at the Container Store. The fact is, people tend to be somewhat messy. You can get someone to be neater for a short time, but they spring back to the same level of messiness.

Did your survey find much gender difference in this matter?

Not as much as I expected. Most people assume that women are neater and men are messier, but in general, we found that wasn't true. Now, women do tend to be harsher judges. A man and a woman looking at the same situation will often see it differently. A woman will be harder on herself and her husband, while a man will be easier on himself and his wife.

Do people make judgments about messy people?

Sure. I have a moderately messy home, and I've had people walk in and say, "Hey, you guys are kind of messy. What's up with that?" It doesn't bother me that much, but it points up how friends and relatives and colleagues and bosses will pass judgment if you aren't neat enough.

Aren't there some situations where we don't want any messiness?

We don't want surgeons or pharmacists to be messy. We don't want train engineers or pilots to be messy. I'm an amateur pilot, and I know very well that you have to be ordered and follow that checklist every time if you want to be safe. But for the most part, the way people criticize somewhat messier people is unfair. We've held up neat and orderly people as heroes in our society and held up messy people as villains or hapless victims of their bad habits. The opposite isn't necessarily true; I just think we all need to be more comfortable with the way we are naturally.

Is it wrong to tell a kid to clean up his room?

It certainly isn't wrong if your child is dysfunctionally messy and is losing his or her homework all the time. But I think it's silly to force kids to be very neat and ordered. It goes counter to the way kids think, work and play. If you fight with your kid a lot about straightening up, as many people do, I would ask this: Don't you have better things to fight about? Can you possibly imagine looking back 15 years from now and thinking, "Gee, I wish I had spent more time getting my kid to straighten his or her room"?

You have three children. Did you follow that advice with them?

That has not been a source of strain in this family. Incidentally, one of my children just walked into the house clutching a tooth that apparently fell out today. Now there's a mess for you.