My desk’s empty (let’s leave my mind out of it)

BRITISH survey has found that, nationwide, 35.7 million days are wasted annually searching for missing documents, and that males over 45 have the messiest desks. One in 10 messy office workers admits to having lost business because of a cluttered desk.

Since about AD1234 (or was it AD1244?) it has been generally believed that people who have messy desks have messy minds.

But Mark Lansdale of Loughborough University in England has argued that people with messy desks know exactly where to find things and have orderly minds.

One immediately suspects that Lansdale’s desk is like a municipal refuse tip.

He identifies what he calls the “volcano model” – 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

Aslide on to the floor on its way to oblivion. Maureen Kark, a Joburg executive trained in psychology, agrees. She says people with tidy desks often have an obsession about tidiness to compensate for having a disorganised mind.

That’s definitely me. My desk is always tidy; my mind is something else.

I look back at the desks of my colleagues.

The desk of our political writer – in those days it was Patrick Laurence, a tall bearded man who looked like an eccentric professor – was like Mount Pinatubo.

Yet he was wonderfully precise when analysing politics.

The same goes for 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

But my PC’s hard drive…

well, speaking of workstation disorder

Contact Stoep: E-mail: jcl@onwe.co.za;

Website: www.jamesclarke.co.za; Blog: http://stoeptalk.wordpress.com a wastepaper depot. Yet he had a very ordered mind.

The late Arnold Benjamin – lawyer, columnist and leader writer – also preferred the Fujiyama style of filing. Even his shelves were piled high with scraps of paper, which frequently slid to the floor. One day, there was a spectacular avalanche and we had to use 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 to my study after a long absence and find it piled high with 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 woman. It’s 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, say, from 10 to 500 files, many of which are useful and many of which are obsolete. When I open my computer’s “Windows 7”, no welcoming breeze blows through to whisk the surplus on to the floor.

Files do not turn yellow or brittle with age in a computer, so everything looks fresh and important.

It takes an iron will to delete stuff from one’s PC, stuff you feel one day might prove useful.

It’s like cleaning out the garage and trying to decide whether to throw away all the broken electrical gear and computer cables, unused tools, half-used tubes of glue and silicon and long-forgotten gadgets that once seemed a good idea.

And the box of rags one stores for cleaning the car – dump them? Yes! No! Wait. Keep them. No!

It’s all too much.