Scientists Find Order in Chaos and Declare: Messy Desks Don’t Mean Messy Minds

This Week in Germany--January 8 1993

For all those veterans of failed resolutions to maintain neat and orderly workspaces, for all those hardcore slobs with bad consciences, peace of mind is near: a recent article in Der Spiegel magazine maintains that people whose desks (and surrounding areas) are awash with paper and assorted tools of their trade are actually better organized and essentially more orderly than their neatnik counterparts. This claim is based on a recent British study of the search-and-find methods of people with messy offices by ergonomist Mark Lansdale of Loughborough University. Lansdale concluded that the messy people were actually “like commanders on a battlefield”' and that they had a highly developed, complex system of ordering. In the study, both “slobs” and “neatiks” were asked to find certain papers and separate-but-interrelated materials; the messy subjects found more, and were faster, than those with carefully-alphabatized filing svstems. According to the study, seemingly messv people use a “contextual technique” to find what they need, which often includes “tumultuous burrowing and scratching” as the worker recollects the circumstances that first brought the object in question into his or her sphere. In doing so, they use all sorts of real-life clues, such as telephone calls or visits to the toilet, thus categorizing the material within a “natural” context, rather than relying on external organizers.

According to Lansdale, many corporate executive officers are among the neater types. Apparent chaos reigned in the working lives of Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Pope John XXIII, Marilyn Monroe, and Der Spiegel reporter and author of the article, Henry Glass, who is pictured in his office, where a tempest of newspapers, books, files, and equipment swirls around his relatively clear workspace. Glass falls into a pattern described by Lansdale as typical for people with so-called messy offices: the “volcanic model.” This consists of a center “crater” or fairly clear area, surrounded by walls of books, papers, newspapers and maybe a forgotten cracker or two. The seeming confusion is usually confined to the work area, although with practice, an entire room or dwelling can be transformed.

A legendary case was Dagofil (“Jimmy”) Vrba, a sportswriter and novel editor for the Prager Tagblatt, a German-language daily published in Prague in the early part of this century. The highly-developed volcano model of Vrba's office, a veritable sea of books, manuscript pages, clothing, half-eaten food, and assorted garbage proved lucky on at least one occasion: a November afternoon in 1918, when Czech nationalists stormed the Tagblatt building, intent on demolishing the offices. The first office they saw was Vrba's. “Oh, our men have been here already,” they called out, and left the building undisturbed.