Speaker’s corner
PEOPLE with messy desks have messy minds. That has been the standard belief since psychologists looked at desks in 1296, or was it 1387? Whatever it is, one of their number, psychologist Mark Lansdale of Loughborough University in England, says people with messy desks know exactly where to find things and have orderly minds.
One immediately suspects that Mark Lansdale’s desk looks like a municipal refuse tip. He describes the “volcano model” – this is a desk piled high with a conical heap of papers. The owner draws from the crater in the middle. Less urgent material gets shunted to one side from where it will eventually slide on to the floor and find its way to oblivion.
A newspaper report on Lansdale’s theory quoted Maureen Kark, a Johannesburg executive trained in psychology, saying that people with tidy desks often have an obsession about tidiness and that this is to compensate for having a disorganised mind. That is me exactly! At the time the report was published I looked around at my colleagues’ desks. Journalists, I realised, are almost invariably the volcanic type.
The desk of our political writer – in those days it was Patrick Laurence, a tall man who looked like an eccentric professor – was like Mount Pinatubo. Yet he was wonderfully precise when analysing politics.
The same with Shaun Johnson, in those days a young Oxford graduate who wore such things as unstructured jackets and who pioneered the fashion in the world of newspapers of wearing brightly coloured trouser braces. He had just been appointed political editor of The Star and his desk was like a wastepaper collection point.
But, here again, was a man with a very ordered mind.
The late Arnold Benjamin, columnist and leader writer, also preferred the Fujiyama style of filing, and even his shelves were piled high with scraps of paper like snow on a mountain ledge.
Every year or so there would be a spectacular avalanche and, although I was not there to witness it, at one stage they had to call in sniffer dogs to find him.
Editors, I have noticed, tend to have desks like Japanese gardens – sterile and ordered. And their minds? (Do you think I’m crazy or something?)
Me? I try to keep my desk empty except for my tea mug.
When I come back after a long absence and find it piled high with letters and papers, I open a window and allow the wind to blow through. Anything that remains on my desk I act upon; that which lands on the floor is taken away by the cleaning lady. I call it God’s will. What worries me is the mess inside my computer – it is the electronic equivalent of the volcano model. I have hundreds of folders, each of which contains from, say, 10 to 500 files, many of which are useful and many of which are obsolete. One can open all the windows one likes in a computer, but no welcoming breeze blows through to whisk the surplus on to the floor for carrying away.
Computer files do not turn yellow or brittle with age so everything looks fresh and important.
It takes an iron will to delete stuff from one’s PC – stuff that you feel might one day prove useful.
It’s like cleaning out the garage and trying to decide what to throw away. Do I really need a number 18 spanner? Throw it away and next day some friend will come begging for just such a spanner.
And this box of rags I am storing to clean the car… dump them? No keep them. No chuck ’em away. Yes! No! Yes!
And all these electrical plugs and cables? I mean, you never know. I usually end up leaving everything undisturbed and go indoors to find something to eat.