At the crossroads of Creativity & Clutter

An article on the APA site, A messy desk encourages a creative mind, study finds, written in 2013, describes an experiment in which people were divided by whether they worked on a tidy desk or one — well, like mine, pictured above. They were then offered snacks, either an apple or other healthy snack or a candy bar. The messy deskers took the candy and the tidy folks took the apple.

Then the experiment was repeated, and the two halves were asked to come up with creative and unique uses for a ping pong ball. The messy half were considered much more innovative with what they came up with than the tidy group.

That’s not the only study out there to find that creative minds can thrive in chaos. Elitedaily.com found that creative people could flourish in chaotic environments in The psychology behind messy rooms, published in 2014. The article went on to say that just being messy on purpose wouldn’t make anyone creative. Just that messy and creative correlate, when messy is “messy by nature.”

So where does that leave us when 1. clutter starts to intrude on peace of mind and make it hard to concentrate, let alone create; and 2. there’s no room left to create in?

I thought it was just entropy. My office gets to the point where what were stacks of current projects I didn’t want to put away because put away…