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Clean Desk Policy
By Brick | February 3, 2008
I have a feeling this guy is not on any kind of information diet! Mr. Gore is not the only one whose workspace has been overtaken by clutter. Up until last week, my office was more of an exercise in entropy than a place to work. After having been inspired by a post in Lodewijk van den Broek’s How to Be an Original blog, I set to work a week ago to rid my workspace of clutter.
While I have sought to rid my house of unnecessary clutter, I have had a bit of a psychological block when it came to my office. Subconsciously, I think I have always equated lots of information with intelligence, importance and self value. Basically, in my mind:
Information Overload = Smart Person = Messy Desk
Al Gore’s desk reminds me of the work spaces of most of my university professors - stacks of academic journals on their desks, books and papers literally falling out of the bookcases. I think back to one of the most intelligent fellows I have ever worked with in the banking industry: he ran out of horizontal surfaces at arm level, so started piling stuff on the floor! I think over time I just developed this sense that the messier one’s workspace, the more important, intelligent and productive they must be…so I set off to replicate that kind of environment.
As luck would have it, experts have recently reinforced my unconscious correlation between messy desks and smart people. In A Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, the authors actually argue that a messy desk can be an attribute of an effective worker. As they point out in the book, “Einstein’s desk at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, was maintained…in a stupendous disarray.” The book suggests that messiness can be related to higher education and higher salaries.
Expert opinions aside, I think my messy office became more a source of stress than a higher salary. All of the papers and files piled on my desk simply suggested things to myself like disorder, incompleteness, and distraction.
My process for cleaning my office pretty much amounted to putting everything in my office into one big pile and processing them one at a time into the following categories:
- Garbage
- Store/archive
- Organize
- I’ll touch on how I dealt with organization in a later post, but I will tell you it took me a week to get through everything! However, I just wanted to mention that today is Day 1 of my clutter free office! So far, it is mentally refreshing to work without the visual distraction of all that clutter. For inspiration on your own workspaces, check out Unclutterer’s Flickr Workspaces Pool. What do you think? Are Abrahamson and Freedman right or did I do the right thing by cleaning up?
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Topics: Organization |
September 10th, 2009 at 8:00 am
Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog.
Cheers! Sandra. R.
September 10th, 2009 at 9:20 am
Thanks Sandra! I hope to add some more content soon. I hope you’ll continue to stop by (or subscribe if you’re into the rss thing).