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Keep your desk a mess

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(MoneyWatch) "A tidy desk is a tidy mind," my old boss used to say. My rejoinder was: "If that's so, what does an empty desk say about you?"

The boss in question worked in an open plan office that he tried constantly, and unsuccessfully, to keep tidy. Seventy percent of American offices are now open plan. I love them; many others loathe them. Open plan was introduced to do two things: Save money by using available space more efficiently, and aid communication by making it easy to see and hear what others are up to. Some people also imagined that this would make everyone more creative.

The money saving worked; it's not clear whether the other benefits have materialized. An intriguing study into the relationship between messiness and creativity suggests that messy settings are correlated with more creative work. Like all correlations, it's not at all clear how this works. Does the mess make us more creative? Are more creative people more tolerant of mess? Nobody knows.

But the authors of the study speculate that open plan offices militate against creativity. The emphasis on minimalism and the sheer difficulty of personalizing workspaces makes everyone tidy -- and that tidiness makes them dull. I understand the logic of this argument. What I don't understand is: What offices are they talking about? Every open plan office I've ever worked in was unbelievably messy: Papers everywhere, abandoned coffee cups, clothes, toys, gym equipment, bicycles, helmets, shoes. In my old office, we'd have regular clean up sessions to keep the chaos at bay; the resulting tidiness lasted no more than a day.

So I don't buy the argument that open plan is tidy and therefore uncreative. What I believe to be more likely is that creative people have a high tolerance for disorder. One of the ways you reach a new idea is by wading through a lot of mess and confusion. Run away from it and you get nowhere new; tolerate it and you might reach undiscovered territory.

As for open plan offices, if in fact they do reduce creativity, I don't think that has anything to do with order or disorder. The key question about office spaces is: Do they make you feel like a cog in a machine -- or like a kid in a candy store? If the former, creativity's a lost cause; if the latter, well you're in with a chance. Have fun!

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