In Defense Of Office Clutter

If the Office Organization Police stopped by your cubicle without warning, what would they find? I recently moved my desk, so it’s in pretty tidy shape. Phew. But my laptop desktop is a cluttered mixture of folders (which I consider the height of organization), haphazardly titled in-process documents, and photos including “cute hair.jpeg,” a snapshot of a person I’ve only met once which I creepily grabbed from Facebook to inspire me as I grow my hair out. (Her hair looks SO good!) Does this state of office dishevelment reflect poorly on me as a worker — or as a person? Am I headed for “Hoarders”?

Over at the Wall Street Journal’s blog the Juggle, Chana Schoenberger muses about the role of clutter in productive work. She maintains a fairly streamlined desktop: a few framed family photos, other photos taped to the wall, an old name card kept for sentimental purposes, a small leather box, and a mug. She wasn’t always so organized, and she’s worked with colleagues who are even more scattered, surrounded by piles of papers (a particular hazard at a newspaper, in my experience).

As Schoenberger points out, “Clutter presents a problem of perception at the office.” Though some argue clutter makes you look like you have too much going on to bother with mundane things like tidying up, others (including Schoenberger) think it looks unprofessional. Some companies even institute “clean desk policies” that force employees to tidy up before they head home.

But cleanliness isn’t necessarily next to godliness at the office. In a 2002 article in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about how stacks of paper actually serve real functions in office life, despite the fact that they’re viewed as the failure to ascend to our ultimately perfectly organized paperless life:

When a group at Apple Computer studied piling behavior several years ago, they found that even the most disorderly piles usually make perfect sense to the piler, and that office workers could hold forth in great detail about the precise history and meaning of their piles. The pile closest to the cleared, eighteen-inch-square working area, for example, generally represents the most urgent business, and within that pile the most important document of all is likely to be at the top. Piles are living, breathing archives. Over time, they get broken down and resorted, sometimes chronologically and sometimes thematically and sometimes chronologically and thematically; clues about certain documents may be physically embedded in the file by, say, stacking a certain piece of paper at an angle or inserting dividers into the stack.

In other words, he wrote, “piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking,” and they’re particularly valuable to “knowledge workers.”

Computer desktops reveal more than we might think, too. Earlier this year, the website Hunch.com conducted a huge survey to probe the connection between computer desktop organization and demographics. The results: A messy desktop means you’re more likely to be liberal, urban, educated, ambitious, and good at math. Tidy desktops are likely to be maintained by “young tech-savvy suburbanites that say their personal life is more important than work.” Men are 13% likelier to be neat than women.

The takeaway: mild, non-Collyer-brothers-level disorganization at the office is probably not the sign of a cluttered mind. Stop beating yourself up over it. Besides, I am totally going to get serious about organizing next week. I mean it this time.