I’ve got to come clean about something.

If you walked into my home office, you'd see a mess.

A clean working mess (not talking garbage here). But a bit scattered nonetheless.

Papers on the floor and the desk and side table. Sketches pinned to walls. Supplies in corners. Pens scattered everywhere. Books books books.

My family walks past this room regularly. Bless them. They see the chaos.

I'm can’t even pretend it looks good. Some artists keep everything perfectly organized. Good for you. My brain doesn’t always work that way.

An artist is sometimes messy. I'm stating this as a fact, and not trying to make some excuse.

The papers in and around the desk are there because they're important. They are there when I need to reach for them. Sitting right in front of me, or on the desk, they'd distract me from whatever I'm working on right now.

There's a certain logic to all of it, I swear.

On the Outside Looking In

Judging messes from the outside is easy.

I show up at client sites, observe, draw what I see, then leave. They stay. They run the operations, manage the systems, and deal with the complexity that’s been building for years.

Sometimes people apologize with something like, “I bet you feel sorry for us. This place is a mess. Our processes are chaotic.”

I always respond, “No, I get it.”

I’m a tourist. They keep the lights on. Those are two very different positions.

People might see a mess and assume a style of dysfunction. Or lack of organization. Or that nobody cares.

But inside that mess, there are constraints, or trade-offs, or decisions made with incomplete information. Systems can’t always just be up and replaced because someone from the outside thinks they should be.

What Mess Means

Mess usually means you’re working.

Systems grow under pressure. People solve problems in real time with whatever resources they have. Nothing gets designed perfectly from scratch.

The overwhelmed inbox. The impossible-to-navigate shared drive. The process that works but looks terrible.

It’s evidence of real work happening under real constraints.

What mess are you judging that’s actually just proof something is getting done?

Distance makes judgment easy. Being close to the work changes how you see it.

You’re inside the system trying to make it run. You don’t get to step back and redesign everything. You’re trying to get through the day without things breaking.

Some Compassion

I’m not saying never improve anything.

It’s more along the lines of not being so hard on yourself when sitting in the middle of it.

My messy office is actually proof of reaching the goal Megan and I had for this business. I started out just drawing at our kitchen table, then I progressed to the dining room, and eventually it became necessary for us to create a space in our home for business only, the office. (Megan eventually moved her workspace out because her way of work requires clean lines and clear spaces - but that’s a whole OTHER newsletter.)

You don’t need perfect organization before you can move forward. Clarity happens even when things are messy.

The cleanest room isn’t always where the best work happens. Sometimes, mess is what it costs to do the work instead of endlessly preparing to do it.

My office will stay “messy”. Papers will stay on the floor where I can see them. I like to call that “creative space”.

Client systems will stay complex. Legacy processes will keep running because replacing them is harder than maintaining them.

The work gets done anyway. The art gets made. The lights stay on.

Grateful you are here,

Wade

PS - Want someone to come in and look at how your systems are running, or if there’s a mess that can be cleaned? Let’s talk….