The Office
Messy desk, messy mind?
LATE one evening, I dropped in on a friend at The Wall Street Journal in New York. I was amazed to see an open-plan office filled with tidy desks. Divided into pods, each desk had a roll-top back. Everything had to be locked away behind the roller at the end of the day. Cleaners, apparently, had carte blanche to sweep into a bin anything left in view. It freaked me out.
No matter how neat my desk is at the start of the day, within an hour it’s covered in detritus essential to my work. It may look like a job lot headed for the recycling depot but I need every item.
An office is often divided into two camps: the messy versus the tidy. I once sat next to a man who laid out his pens in order of colour, all pointing in the same direction. “A place for everything and everything in its place,” he’d mutter. It didn’t make him better at his job in my (messy) opinion. If he’d learned to accumulate, he’d have spent less time bothering about symmetry and more time fine-tuning his reports.
Associate Professor Jessica Grisham from the University of NSW’s School of Psychology, says research shows it’s harder to focus when surrounded by mess. “But the outside-the-box, creative thinker can thrive,” says Grisham, whose own desk is “mildly cluttered”. She’s in awe of a colleague whose desk is “supertidy. She’s very organised and effective.”
In a study by the University of Minnesota, behavioural scientist Kathleen Vohs and her team found that disordered offices inspire originality and a search for novelty. Two groups, one in a messy room and the other in a tidy room, were asked to come up with new uses for a ping-pong ball. The ideas from the messy room were rated as more interesting and creative by impartial judges.
“Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights,” concluded Vohs. So, if you need to think outside the box, ignore the clutter and free your imagination.
John Caldon, chairman and managing director of Flame Media and keeper of an immaculate desk, disagrees with the premise. “I have a special hatred of the messy desk,” he says. “Employees protest that their extraordinary busyness precludes a tidy desk. I say that with clear thinking and a clean desk, one can not only get the spelling right but also complete far more business.”
“A tidy mind is more important,” counters his partner, food writer and TV presenter Lyndey Milan. “I’d love to have time to tidy my desk but when you work as intensely as I do, it rarely gets done. But it’s all in my head – a memory for detail and where things are.”
She’s in good company. Mark Twain was famously messy. And asked about his chaotic desk, Albert Einstein replied: “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, then what are we to think of an empty desk?”
Your work colleagues probably equate neatness with efficiency and consider a lack of organisational skills and basic social decorum a big negative. But if you’re the type to clutter, take no notice. Tell them fussing about a pristine desk wastes energy and stifles creativity.
Who better to prove the point than, ironically, the man responsible for streamlining our lives by contributing to the paperless desk: the late Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple. Apparently, his desk was a shocker.