Nobody Tell Charles Mudede
posted by on December 22 at 16:21 PM
From the New York Times’ #1 most emailed article right now:
Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat “office landscapes”).
Charles’s desk, to jog your memory:
Unfortunately, my offices always end up looking this way. I must be super creative!
It's the so-called 80-20 rule in action: the stratum on my desktop is well below the results-producing 20%.
So why the hell am I not rich and famous? My whole life is that messy.
Journalists who jump to conclusions about cause-and-effect should be whapped on the nose with a rolled up newspaper. A much more likely explanation is that people who earn higher salaries can get away with being messy. How long would a secretary last with a desk that looked like that? But the CEO can get away with losing things and then stomping around blaming other people.
thank you margaret!
The difference: A secretary's JOB is to be neat and orderly. That is their entire function. A writer doesn't have to be so neat.
And if you read the article you'd find that it actually celebrates being messy, and explains how some folks can find things instantly even through all the mess. There's no stomping around and blaming people.
I loved this article; thanks for the tip!
My favorite line:
"Consider that desks, our work landscapes, are stand-ins for our brains, and so the piles we array on them are cognitive artifacts, or data cues, of our thoughts as we work."
And-- Einsteins oft-quoted remark, "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk?"
Piling on (HAHA GET IT). My desks always turn out messy.
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