The state of your desk

How clear should your desk, office or home be?

Our navigator recently got around to clearing out some closets, getting rid of some uniforms from his Navy days and other clothes he’ll never wear again.  The main idea was to dispose of unnecessary things.  It also led to some rearranging of his apartment and workspace, leading to free space where there had been clutter.  He unexpectedly found that it’s a little bit easier to work on his projects now, without clutter on the edge of his vision.  It’s not a matter of just being able to find or get to things he needs; that wasn’t a problem.  All of which raises the much-discussed question: how clean should your desk be?

An ancient slogan holds that a clean desk is a sign of a similarly empty mind.  Our astronomer reminds us that his thesis advisor, an accomplished and insightful scientist, rarely saw the wood of his desktop.  Indeed, several of the piles of papers were three projects thick.  But he could instantly put his hand on anything he needed.  And a messy desk is certainly the sign of some activity.  At the same time, a completely clear workspace can be intimidating, as bad as a writer facing a blank sheet of paper in the typewriter (in the old days).

Of course there are practical matters.  If you cannot actually find things you need, your workspace needs more organization.  And you need space to work, writing by hand on paper or typing on a computer.  (We’re not going to try to address the workshops of artisans or artists here.)

From our experience, we conclude that most people’s workspaces are slightly to significantly more cluttered than is optimum.  Certainly each of us has spent time searching for something we know is there, but can’t immediately find; and we’ve seen the same thing happen to friends and colleagues.  An organizing and decluttering effort would pay off in the long run.  But there’s always something more urgent (or more interesting) to do, so the task gets put off.  Until, perhaps, some other event makes it unavoidable.

So in principle we should devote a week, or a month, or whatever time it takes to thoroughly organize our workspace, making sure that we know where each paper, book, reference or resource is.  It would increase our productivity and decrease wasted time.  We should certainly make efforts in that direction.

But there is one drawback we can think of to being quite organized, something that comes to mind whenever we dig through the deep archives.  Having all our projects visible would remind us of how much we have thought of or planned, that we haven’t carried through.  And that would be intimidating indeed.