Clean Desk?

    I love a clean desk.  I really do.  The problem is that I do not often have one.

I clean my desk at my school office before the start of each school year.  It then gets progressively more and more cluttered until the following August.

I clean my desk in my home office maybe three times a year mostly because we are have family over or having a dinner party.  As my office is the closest room to the front door, I am given the assignment, well more like a directive, to clean it up whenever we have company.

When I say my desks get progressively more cluttered, I understate what really happens.  Actually, I am astonished at how quickly both desks get cluttered.  I have file cabinets and wastebaskets but am apparently have no clue of what they are for.  I truly make a resolution each time I clean too keep the desks clean and organized.  It would, truly, only take 5-10 minutes a day.  I might do it for a day or two, but it never lasts. 

As my desks get cluttered, the effective work space gets smaller.  Maybe, like blinders on a horse, the clutter helps me focus more on whatever it is I am doing.  Yeah, that must be the reason. 

Does it really matter?  If I kept my workspaces tidier, would I be more productive?  I am not the first to ask this question.  I am not the first to write about it.  According to 2014 article in Forbes, Albert Einstein noted, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”  The article went on to talk about a study that investigated clean desk and cluttered desk people:  “a tidy… desk influences people to be more conventional, more generous and to make healthier choices. But, perhaps more interestingly, working at a cluttered desk positively influences people’s creative thinking ability.”  Hmm, I am going to have to say guilty as charged.

In January, I wrote a piece The Dawn of a New Year and New Decade.  I was feeling pretty good about the coming year and the start of a new decade.  The Corona Virus, at that point, was something that was only in China.  I really did not expect that I would be working from home for three months.  I was unaware I would be on the Emergency Management Team of North Park University.  That team has since transformed into the Reopen North Park Team.  With my professorial duties, which I refer to as my “day job,” I spend a lot of time in my home office.  Currently, my days are full of MS Teams (think Zoom) meetings.  I have not had so many meetings since my last corporate gig. 

Both of my offices and desks are in a constant state of organized chaos, basically they are always a mess.  Every day I think about de-cluttering and clearing my desk and office.  Do I do it? No.  At least, not until we h

Annie Leibovitz for Vogue
improvisedlife.com

ave a dinner party

In that same January blog, I included a photo of Karl Lagerfeld, who passed away in 2019.  It was a beautiful photo of the iconic designer at work at his incredibly cluttered desk.  That photo makes me feel better, less guilty, about my cluttered desk.

Maybe, I’ll just stop beating up myself for not having a clean and tidy desk.