Messy Desks are Best

I feel so much better now. From the NY Times:

Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat “office landscapes”) and that messy closet owners are probably better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts.

Based on the state of my desk, I should be getting a raise. 🙂 In all seriousness though, while my desk always looks messy, there’s method to the madness: I am a horizontal organizer. When I need a document that’s somewhere on my desk, I can usually put my hand on it in a few seconds. Every couple of months I go through a clean-out and dump obsolete documents, and for a while it’s clean but hard to find things without rifling through a stack of papers. I agree when the author says, “the most valuable dividend of living with mess may be time”. By condensing my “filing” activities to a rare occasions, it’s much faster to dump lots of useless stuff that I might have spent time filing and forgetting about had I kept my desk cleaner.