Though the conclusions sound reasonable, the research also sounds like the prototypical study that can’t be replicated. Very similar to things like “washing hands makes you feel less guilty”.
My take is that a messy desk (or desktop) might be the product of creativity but also tends to make one less productive…since any undertaking necessitates wading through the morass, you’re less likely to want to begin a project that takes a lot of time. But boy do those random, unnecessary creative thoughts come through, perhaps to dissuade one from thinking about how long it would take to get organized.
I wonder if we can analyze this in terms of processing algorithms. Analogize doing scientific research to doing some sort of search on a tree. Neat people probably are doing a depth-first only kind of search pattern. They don’t need to leave the paper open on the table because they finish with it before they move onto the next thing. Messy people are doing some sort of breadth-first search with some sort of look-ahead. They are making a calculation about how likely a given branch is likely to pay off and then moving onto the next branch. The breadth-first approach requires more memory (and desk space) than the depth-first approach but it has potential to be more efficient.
Anecdotally, this totally fits with my lived experience. Those coworkers who scoffed at my messy desk typically worked on one (relatively narrow) thing at a time, to completion. I was always doing multiple things and considering the potential interactions among several moving parts.
You might be on to something…
I’m definitely the sort whose desk gets messy. Enough that I periodically must stop everything else and clean it up, or I won’t be able to do anything else. And no amount of effort on my part has ever changed this cycle.
But in other areas, I can’t help but be quite neat: when baking or cooking, I need all the dishes to be put away and surfaces clean in order to begin, and the kitchen will still be cleaner when I’m done than it was at the start.
Likewise when doing something like woodworking or working on a bicycle, the tools start and generally stay neatly organized, and everything gets tidied and swept when the work’s done.
I just don’t seem able to care about desk stuff the same way.
You are speaking my language.
I wonder what the difference is. It’s almost like the more hands-on things versus the…I don’t want to say cerebral bc I think baking and woodworking and fixing bikes is also quite cerebral…maybe “mechanical” things require the better organization to start with?
Interesting.
I don’t really know. I’ve seen people with very disorganized workshops before, so it’s not as though you can’t do ${manual_task} that way.
Honestly, to me it just feels like I couldn’t even do cooking/repair/etc. without being pretty organized about it, but that still leaves the question of why I can’t do that with a desk…
Totally, I meant specifically for people who’s brains are organized like ours. As in, messy desk, no problem. Messy kitchen, I can’t even think about starting until this is tidy. Nope.
When I cook, it is a war zone. The thing about cooking that is very different than coming up with a proof or fixing a bicycle, is that you have to have multiple activities happening at the same time and all of them timed such that they end up together. I can definitely see people using a very different organization strategy for that.
Yeah, I think that’s what makes the difference for me, too, but in the opposite direction. In my office, I’m working on a bunch of interrelated things, but nothing that relies on being done within moments of each other to work out (more likely weeks or days, hours at the very least).
In the kitchen, like you say, it can be down to seconds. So I’m super organized and clean and clear everything as I go to keep it that way.
I don’t mean any way is better than the other, I like how differently we all come up with our best way. (But unless you also enjoy kitchen clean up, I don’t think I’d want to be roommates with you, lol. )
This is exactly how I start a new art piece. Lay out open books on the desk, hang scans & photocopies above it, keep the drawing tools to hand, everything out on the surface so I can grab whatever I need at the moment to move the idea forward. I have a vague mental image of what I’m getting at, & the images in the books & papers provide inspiration & offer techniques for how others have gotten somewhere similar in the past. So I start breadth-first & then jump from branch to branch, while my desk gets messier & messier.
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