Why your cluttered desk might be the key to success in the workplace

messy desk

Jane Austen just needed a small walnut tripod table adorned with nothing but a quill and a pot of ink to write about the trials and tribulations of the Bennets, while Mark Twain conjured the adventures of Huckleberry Finn from a desk buried in a sea of paper.

Steve Jobs favoured unwieldy piles of folders and notebooks flanking a large Apple monitor, and by comparison Bill Gates’s desk looks like something from Architectural Digest. Before them both, every nook and cranny of Thomas Edison’s bureau was crammed with endless rolls of paper (among them, no doubt, the blueprints for his many inventions) and Einstein’s was, put simply, pure chaos. Alan Turing, for his part, got by with just a typewriter and a few stacks of notes at Bletchley, while Sigmund Freud kept his desk artfully arranged with antiquities.

It might seem reductive to boil down some of the greatest minds in their respective fields to what their desk says about them. Though it does, at least, seem to track – Gates was always going to be an “everything in its place” guy; no one with a hairstyle like Einstein’s was going to work amid some sort of minimalist idyll.

Perhaps it’s also a helpful anthropological study with which to justify your own habits? If you are of the “tidy desk, tidy mind” school of thought, you might be pleased to count yourself in the same camp as Austen. And if your desk has a certain chaotic creativity to it then the next time a colleague tells you it resembles the seventh circle of hell, perhaps you can come back with: “Well, if it was good enough for cough billionaire founder of Apple and noted genius of his generation Steve Jobs, it’s good enough for me.”

In fact, staff at Manchester United’s HQ, who have been called out by their new co-owner, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, for their poor desk etiquette, might like to send him some examples of the workspaces maintained by the Steve Jobs of the world (and the Einsteins, and the Edisons), for whom messiness spelled magic and mastery.

Ratcliffe was taking a stroll through the Man Utd offices when he was struck by a “high degree of untidiness”. “In particular the IT department, which frankly was a disgrace, and the dressing rooms of the U18 and U21 were not much better. It’s a small thing in many ways but unless an organisation has standards and discipline it will not succeed,” he said in a stern email delivered to all employees at the storied, underperforming football club.

A messy office, he said, is proof that “we don’t care enough to keep things shipshape”.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe has no tolerance for a messy workplace - Jon Super

Desk etiquette has long been a source of tension in workplaces, not least at The Telegraph, where people hammer away at their keyboards in close quarters and one deskmate’s idea of artful piles could be another’s idea of anxiety-inducing disarray.

“Every now and then – and especially when I have a deadline – I think, maybe I should tidy my desk,” says one colleague whose desk could reasonably be described as cluttered. “And then I think, nah, life is short.” Her neighbour doesn’t appear (yet) to have noticed that the boundary lines between their desks are being encroached little by little every day. “I need an overflow area. I don’t think she minds…”

Experts are divided over whether it pays to be in the messy desk camp or if the greatest minds run a tighter ship. Researchers at the University of Minnesota tested the ingenuity of a group of students, seeing how well they would come up with new ideas if half were placed in an orderly environment and the other half in a messy space. “Participants in the messy room generated the same number of ideas for new uses as their clean-room counterparts,” the study found. “But their ideas were rated as more interesting and creative when evaluated by impartial judges.”

Being in a messy room “led to something that firms, industries and societies want more of: creativity.”

Vindication for the winner of this newspaper’s messiest desk award who, incidentally, deems people with very tidy desks “neurotic”. “Like people who obsessively make spreadsheets and tick things off lists and disinfect everything.”

Far from harbouring any messy desk shame, she has radical self-acceptance for her slovenly ways. “Occasionally I do tidy it but I find it just recolonises the next day, more enthusiastically than before. It may be a virus.”

There’s a strong argument for keeping on top of the clutter. One survey of 2,000 UK office workers, conducted by global technology provider Brother UK, showed over a fifth of people felt that having a messy desk contributed to their workload, while 25 per cent said a workmate’s clutter had had “a negative impact” on how much they were able to get done.

Meanwhile, the Harvard Business Review says physical work environments “influence employee performance and wellbeing”. “Cluttered spaces can have negative effects on our stress and anxiety levels, as well as our ability to focus.”

It points to a study from the Princeton University Neuroscience Institute which showed our brains “like order”. “Constant visual reminders of disorganisation drain our cognitive resources and reduce our ability to focus.”

Desk neighbours at The Telegraph are often worlds apart

Another colleague confesses to having a classic case of split desk personality syndrome. One half of her workspace – notably, the half that anyone walking by can see – is immaculate. We’re talking a perfect swathe of clear MDF, a couple of Post-it notes placed precisely on the edge of her monitor, a little white pot with a white orchid that appears to be, frankly, thriving. Marie Kondo would thoroughly approve. Until, that is, she walked around the desk and clocked the other side.

“Tidying my desk up properly takes time and unfortunately I don’t have much of it so I have a terrible habit of putting all my mess to one side and dealing with it later,” she explains, admitting that eventually colleagues “spot the piles of used notebooks, unopened post and books I hope to read in a disordered corner – somewhere close, just out of sight”.

Mess makes her feel “anxious”. An untidy desk “just makes a stressful day feel even more chaotic”. Having half a tidy desk, then, is just enough to calm her busy mind.

Another colleague is pleased that his extraordinarily messy neighbour makes his own desk (not exactly a beacon of minimalism – more of the “lived-in” school) look “positively neat”. It should be said his deskmate is happy to own up to her clutter. “Currently under my desk there is a bundle of yoga clothes, a yoga mat, an old keyboard and three pairs of shoes – I can barely stretch my legs out,” she says.

“My actual desk is covered in towers of books; I receive about three new ones a day from publishers. Then there are things like Vitamin D, which has to be seen to be taken, and forks and spoons, because I’m saving the planet.

“My drawers are so stuffed with nonsense built up over eight years at the same desk, I never open them.”

There’s really “no justification” for maintaining such an extreme level of mess, she says. “It just seems to elude me. I wish it was otherwise.

“I’m not as messy at home, but that’s because I seem to spend all my spare time tidying things away. And when I’m at work, well, I’m supposed to be working…”

Perhaps the Man Utd IT department would like to run that one past Sir Jim Ratcliffe.

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