Why You Work Better Behind a Tidy Desk | Chantal van der Leest

,,Oh, there you are,’ I say to colleague S. Behind piles of books and clippings, I suddenly see a dark-haired crown. He looks up with a smirk. “Sorry for the mess.”

I understand that he says that, because indeed: he has so much bric-a-brac in his office. “It’s not even my thing,” he explains. His colleague has a day off, but his things are there. The floor is full of archive boxes, papers are piled high, and a moldy bouquet of brown flowers is sprinkled on the windowsill. S. designates a floor extension. ,,We agreed that he can do damage to this cable. The other side is my part of the office. Beyond the cable, it is indeed much more orderly.

I feel a little sorry for S. I’m pretty upset myself. My office is preferably completely empty, with at most a print or a book next to me. Otherwise I’m just distracted, my head is pretty busy with itself. Like many of my co-workers are different, who don’t seem to care about all sorts of trinkets and piles of empty coffee cups. “Creative minds have messy desks,” they claim, and they seem to be right about that. In a study where people had to come up with creative ways to use a ping pong ball, they found five times as many ideas in a cluttered space.

Still, there are indications that clutter primarily causes stress. Your brain likes order and structure, and anything that grabs attention takes mental energy. This stress then creates more clutter. Because the tension makes you less able to make decisions and you keep everything that can be useful. Your perseverance also suffers from chaos, researchers at Temple University have found. 100 subjects had to try to solve an impossible enigma. In a tidy room they only gave up after almost 19 minutes, in a mess they threw in the towel after 11 minutes.

A clean desk policy so getting in isn’t so bad after all. Unless cleaning becomes procrastination. You really don’t need to have your whole binder in order before you can start a difficult project.

Want to learn more about psychology and work? Read Chantal’s books Why Perfectionists Are Rarely Happy, 13 Tips Against Perfectionism (2021) and Our Fallible Thinking at Work (2018).

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