Desk? You mean there’s an actual desk underneath all these piles of crap?
The last time I worked out of an office (as opposed to working from home) there was a clear desk policy - which I mentally renamed the “shove it in a drawer” policy.
My desk at home, which is used for both paid employment and personal work, is messy most of the time.
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A former coworker had a desk that was roughly equivalent to a mountain with snow on it. He claimed he knew exactly where everything was. In truth, if the papers he was looking for were not right to hand, he’d just print another copy.
We moved offices and I helped him pack his office. I found twenty something copies of one memo.
Don’t remember where I read about a CEO who had a reputation for a clean desk - until someone noticed the inconspicuous door in the corner, leading to the desk in the other room where he actually worked. Never could break my wife of cleaning off my desk (work at home). If you ever hear of divorce or murder here –
I try to keep a neat desk because clutter bothers me. That’s not to say I don’t organize in piles, I just try to keep them in drawers these days. If my desk is a mess, either at work or home, that means I’m currently in the middle of something and don’t bother me until it’s cleaned up.
My dad leaves his piles of paper lying all over the house but he knows exactly what is in which pile. Just this weekend I had to update my info in his address book and I went to put it in the drawer which was sitting open. “Nope,” he said and put it underneath a couple of sheets of paper on top of the desk. That’s where it lives and don’t you dare move it!
I’m not neat to the point of anal retentiveness, but too much clutter distracts me. I keep being reminded of other things that are also important to do, and the end result is that I waste half an hour saying “Oh, wait, I should do this first. Wait, this one is more important. Uh oh, I forgot about that one. Wait, no, the first one was most important.”
I work best when I set up my priorities and then put on my desk the one single thing I want to work on. When I’m done, I put it away, perhaps reassess priorities and then get the next thing up.
(For what it’s worth, I do have a “working desk” and a “meeting desk” but they are both about the same level of organization. The advantage is that I can stop for a meeting without having to put away the current project, and the meeting space is arranged to make it easier to show information to clients.)
Someone must have found this thread under a pile of papers.
I have a New Yorker cartoon in which a guy says “A clean desk is the Devil’s workshop, that’s my motto.”
I also have a column “What’s All this Neatness Stuff Anyhow” from the late great Bob Pease (analog circuit guru) with a picture of his extraordinarily messy desk.
He talks about a colleague who was examining stuff on his neat desk, and throwing most of them in the wastebasket.
Pease: “You sure do keep your desk neat.”
Colleague: “Yeah, if I find something I don’t need, I throw it out.”
Pease: “Doesn’t your wife ever get nervous?”
Colleague: “It’s my third wife …”
(Source: Electronic Design, Oct. 25, 1990)
My desk at work is neat now, but only because I could be leaving at any moment. And only coming in one day a week. Makes me uncomfortable.
It’s not messy if I know where everything is!
I might have a messy desk if policy allowed it. We have to lock up or shred every stick of paper at the end of every workday (bank office job). 8 hours isn’t enough time to get things into a comfortably cluttered state of disarray.
I once worked with a super organized gentleman who had one paper on his desk at a time and filed that before working on something else. My organized chaos drove him crazy. He made the mistake of sending me to an organizational seminar where I found I am a vertical filer. Vertical filers are the folks who need all projects visible, but can find work as quickly as something filed. He never did get me to clean my desk, but I did get him to quit complaining about my mess.
Well, it may LOOK like a mess, but it’s actually quite organized. Those go there and these go here and that stuff gets thrown on the floor over there in that giant heap to be shredded later. It’s all really tidy, really.