It was the most untidy office I had ever seen. On every available horizontal surface including the floor, chairs and window sills, there were piles of documents and manuscripts, theses, books and journals. He was a senior academic and I was there to discuss the analysis of a research project. I heard him invite me in but couldn’t see him until he stood up from behind a paper barricade he had built at the front of his desk. He ushered me over to a table whose surface had long since disappeared and cleared a pile of papers from a chair. At random he dumped it on another pile on the floor. At one point during our meeting, somewhere hidden, a stack of papers collapsed the heard but unseen falling tree in the forest. Without noticing he continued talking p numbers and statistical tests but I was preoccupied with the state of the place. How did anything ever get found or done? How much of it had been read let alone marked? There could be buried work of genius here from students who had long since qualified and who never knew what became of their work. I was so struck by the place that I lost focus on what he was explaining. Not surprisingly the research never got analysed. How could a statistician, someone who makes sense of complex situations and produces clarity from chaos ever choose to exist in such a mad written material maze?
A few years ago a national stationery retailer carried out a survey of office tidiness. They estimated there were 449 million pieces of wasted paper on the UK’s desks which if piled high would reach the height of The Shard 148 times. Over a quarter of the 2000 people surveyed said they had received complaints from their managers and work colleagues about the state of their desk and nearly half admitted to losing important paperwork because their desk was so unorganized. Dr Chamorro, a professor of Business Psychology at UCL said: ‘A messy desk can have a very serious impact on our stress levels and therefore our happiness in general. Over half of our respondents said that their stress levels increased purely at the sight of their messy desk. Our participants’ well-being could be significantly boosted by simply devoting a bit more effort and resource to keeping their office environments tidy and well-organised.’ Others have written of the stress from having piles of unread medical journals although these days my piles tend to be electronic and relate to unread emails something that can feel like a never ending computer game with the impossible objective of a clear inbox. One study did find positive correlations between self-reported tidiness, life satisfaction and subjective happiness so perhaps untidiness at work is a stressor and occupational health should be involved? The last word however belongs to Albert Einstein: ‘If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?’