Brainhack

36 Work Messy

“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”

Albert Einstein

You walk into an Apple store and it's uncluttered and beautifully laid out. In the same way Apple products are about clean lines and simple design. So it would be fairly safe to assume Steve Jobs' desk would have been a perfect example of Zen minimalism.

Wrong, it was a complete tip.

Other famous exemplars of the messy desk are Einstein, Mark Twain, Alexander Fleming, Mark Zuckerberg and Alan Turing.

All in very different fields, but all very creative thinkers.

The question is, were their desks messy because they were creative, or were they creative because they had messy desks?

Was the real reason that one of Fleming's Petri dishes got mould all over it and so helped him invent penicillin, because it got lost under a pile of junk on his desk?

Unlikely. And of course there's more to being creative than just having a messy desk. But research lead by Kathleen Vohs,1 a professor at the University of Minnesota, has found that you do actually get a creativity boost when you work in a messy space.

“You do actually get a creativity boost when you work in a messy space.”

In their first study they created two rooms: a tidy one with books and papers neatly stacked, and a messy one with papers and books strewn all over the place.

They then got over 180 adults to attend what they said was a consumer choice study. Each individual was assigned either the tidy or ...