Is Your Desk Picturesque?

Are you sitting down? At your desk? How’s the view? And, what does it say about you?

Do you feel your desk represents you – this could be a scary question (piles of paper, coffee stains, etc) or one of pride (you actually know the color of the surface of your desk). I must admit that I tend to be more ‘messy desky’ than KonMari, and am coming clean with this fact.

Before we go there, let me say, that I do in fact very much adore my organized, everything-in-its-place, clean desk mates. I am sure that those with cleared desk-scapes feel more productive and less chaotic at their pristine work spaces, with all important papers neatly filed away in color coordinated tabbed folders.

As for me, well, I’m a mess – my desk that is, not me personally. I decided to take this thought to the internet and here is what I found; perhaps my messy desk is not as scary as one may think.

Messy = Creative: According to this blog, creative people tend to have messy desks. This was true of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein and Mark Twain, and today such desks are owned by Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Hseih (Zappos) and Max Levchin (PayPal). FYI, creative people also tend to have a good sense of humor, which is important in almost any situation.

Disheveled = Innovation: This blog shares that disheveled desk folks have a tendency to “come up with creative solutions to hypothetical problems.” Whereas tidy folks’ behaviors and decisions tend to lead to what they expect the outcomes to be. If you’re looking to disrupt, go disheveled.

Untidy = Genius: Albert Einstein once asked, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” In this blog, this thought is considered; perhaps those with an untidy desk simply have better things to do than to spend time cleaning up their clutter.

Clutter = Non-Conventional: This blog suggests that those who feel no need to follow along with convention, what ‘should be’, are also those that may go against the grain a bit. We are less concerned about what we look like to others and completely comfortable with doing our own thing.

It may be difficult for those that have a place for everything and everything in its place to believe that I am actually more organized by stacking my papers, rather than filing them away, but it’s true. And it’s not like I never clean up my space, in fact I actually did spend time cleaning up my stacks yesterday . . . but most it all just ended up in other stacks.