HERE’S one more thing to fret about as you clamber up the corporate heap: does your desk have the right amount of clutter?
Failure in this critical field could explain the career-blight that afflicts millions, according to an internet survey run by a printer-cartridge maker, Jet Tec International. It says that the wrong balance spells ruination in your boss’s eyes — too tidy and you’ll seem retentive; too messy, you appear chaotic; and if it’s decorated with wacky pictures and quotes — well, you’re just plain annoying.
But hope might be at hand in the shape of Office Doctors, a Bristol-based team of desk-clutter troubleshooters who basically throw all your crap out or stick it in a cupboard. Magic, eh? Or perhaps not.
The battle against desk mess may well be misplaced. While the Wall Street Journal claims that the average executive loses six weeks a year searching a messy desk for lost stuff, academic researchers say that clutter equals corporate creativity.
Alison Kidd, an American psychologist, examined why people strew their desks with paper and found that it’s crucial to the creative process. The paper serves as a physical map of what is going on in their heads. Kidd calls it “a temporary holding pattern for ideas and inputs which they cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use”.
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It might look messy, but it can be an efficient way of organising work, say Steve Whittaker and Julia Hirschberg of ATT Labs-Research. They report that many desk messes aren’t random, but are organised in concentric circles. There is a “hot” area, of stuff that is being dealt with now, a “warm” area, of stuff that must be done soon, and a “cold” area, at the edges of the desk, of stuff which could be archived or binned.
So if you’re a messy desker, rip out this article and, next time your boss starts tidy-whining, show it to him. If you can find it.