When my department switched buildings on campus, there were grand ideas involving my new little office. I’d turn things around, get rid of the clutter, be generally awesome. Two months in, it hasn’t happened yet. In spite of a new desk, some neat furniture, and an actual window, the old habits haven’t changed.
I admire people who seem to have a specific place, for every, little, thing. It’s a skill. The neat-freaks are in possession of talents that remain a mystery to those of us who are junk horders; those of us who set things down wherever we happen to get done with them, because we have other things to attend to. I’ve seen some neat-freak’dom that borders on obsession, ….people that can’t function if things are out of place. I’ll take a cluttered office over that level of insecurity/insanity anyday.
Reading an article many months back in the New York Times, the title being “Saying Yes to Mess” I felt better about my organizational deficiencies.
An anti-anticlutter movement is afoot, one that says yes to mess and urges you to embrace your disorder. Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat “office landscapes”) and that messy closet owners are probably better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts. It’s a movement that confirms what you have known, deep down, all along: really neat people are not avatars of the good life; they are humorless and inflexible prigs, and have way too much time on their hands.
…Mess is complete, in that it embraces all sorts of random elements. Mess tells a story: you can learn a lot about people from their detritus, whereas neat — well, neat is a closed book. Neat has no narrative and no personality (as any cover of Real Simple magazine will demonstrate). Mess is also natural, as Mr. Freedman and Mr. Abrahamson point out, and a real time-saver. “It takes extra effort to neaten up a system,” they write. “Things don’t generally neaten themselves.”
..To a professional organizer brandishing colored files and stackable trays, cluttered horizontal surfaces are a horror; to cognitive psychologists like Jay Brand, who works in the Ideation Group of Haworth Inc., the huge office furniture company, their peaks and valleys glow with intellectual intent and showcase a mind whirring away: sorting, linking, producing. (By extension, a clean desk can be seen as a dormant area, an indication that no thought or work is being undertaken.)
Decided not to post a photo of my office. It isn’t awful. But I’m still ashamed.
