I’ve had a very busy winter with lots of client work in addition to writing this newsletter and getting my next project ready to announce to you. My desk top – the physical one – is beginning to show signs of incomplete projects, plans not yet realized, and working until interrupted by the next appointment. What does that look like? Clutter, in a word.

The worst clutter I think I’ve ever seen was many years ago during my accounting studies. I served for a couple of years on the finance committee of a local grass-roots organization (Let’s call it GRO). I was quite inexperienced; I didn’t know a journal from a subsidiary ledger. The bookkeeper at this GRO had always kept books by hand, but computers had arrived and it was time to make the switch. He was very nervous about the change, but was more or less told by the executive director and the more experienced members of the finance committee that he needed to do it.

At the time of the conversion, his office was neat but there were stacks of undone work here and there. He was clearly not caught up. I only hope he had some good help with the conversion and got some training in the new software – I don’t really know because I wasn’t involved in the process. What I do know is that about nine months later, IRS suddenly impounded about $10,000 from the GRO’s bank account for nonpayment of payroll taxes and the bookkeeper took a mental health leave of absence. He never returned to his job.

The executive director’s response was to engage a contract bookkeeper to come in and straighten things out. Her first challenge was organizing all the papers in the office, and she tackled the project with energy and skill. It wasn’t long before she found a cardboard box, about the size of a box of copy paper, full of unopened mail. In that box were months worth of IRS notices about the payroll tax problem.

To this day, I believe the bookkeeper was well-meaning:  he thought he was doing what he needed to do to manage cash when GRO didn’t have much. But he kept silent about it when he should have alerted the executive director and the finance committee so they could do their jobs and manage the situation. Not only were the consequences tough for the GRO, but the bookkeeper’s reputation suffered, too.

Ever since, I’ve understood clutter as a signal that overwhelm is on the horizon. Sometimes the workload is too great, sometimes clutterers are too optimistic about what they can accomplish, sometimes there’s a simple lack of filing cabinets or storage space, sometimes skills to do the work are lacking, sometimes procrastination is a factor. Whatever the cause, the person at the center is at risk for reduced performance and perhaps worse.

If you work for or supervise someone with a clutter problem, take it seriously enough to find out how long-standing a problem it is and notice whether it gets better or worse over time. Don’t let it go on long if you’re the supervisor. If you’re the one supervised, be extra careful to get what you need to do your job – including an annual review.

And if you’re the clutterer, devote some time to addressing the elements of chaos in your immediate surroundings. Consider using experts:  a recently-arrived executive director I know hired a professional organizer to help him get settled in the disorganized office he inherited and she did a great job. What works best for me is setting an intention before I go into my office that I will not read email or do any research or writing; I am going there to create a desk-top that won’t distract me the next time I sit down to work. Looking around me, I see that it’s time.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 10:03 am and is filed under Nonprofit Finance, nonprofit accounting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.