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Tidiness vs creativity5/20/2023 ![]() I suspect this is why thinkers and writers often work amid teetering piles of books. An old report sitting on the corner of your desk can spark a useful idea when you glance at it. “When things are messier, they break free from norms.”Ĭonserve Your Willpower: It Runs Out Arrow “When things are tidy, people adhere more to what’s expected of them,” Vohs says. When her team scored the results, the subjects who’d worked at a messy desk in a messy room were 28 percent more creative than those in the tidy environment. She had the subjects do a classic test of creativity: Generate new uses for a Ping-Pong ball. In one study, Kathleen Vohs, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota, took 48 subjects individually into two types of rooms-one messy (with loose papers and pens strewn around the desk and floor) and one that was spic-and-span. A strand of recent research suggests that mess can, counterintuitively, sometimes be useful. “The lives of those who tidy thoroughly and completely,” she writes, “in a single shot, are without exception dramatically altered.” As the biggest neatnik and picker-upper in my casually messy family, I thrill to this idea.īut one kink, though. There’s been a burst of excitement recently about neatness, propelled by The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo’s best-selling guide that urges us to toss out anything that doesn’t “spark joy.” If we can succeed at decluttering, Kondo says, we will feel pure bliss. Only one corner of the piano had enough vacant space for the old chemist to stand and share his wisdom.Īpparently, other things were more important to him than tidiness.If clutter drives you nuts, you’re in good company. I finally spotted one leg of the piano, which was also covered with papers. Files and research notes were stacked from floor to ceiling around the entire room. I was eager to see the living room in his home, because I had read that he wrote many of his scores of research papers while standing at a grand piano.īut when I entered the room, I had trouble even finding the piano. Years ago I was fortunate to spend three days with Linus Pauling, including one day at his estate on California's Big Sur coastline, which he bought with the winnings from his second Nobel Prize. A messy desk may help them figure out a new way to keep from walking at all. A tidy workplace may help people walk a straight line. Something good can come from either setting, Vohs said. ![]() "Orderly environments, in contrast, encourage convention and playing it safe." "Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights," the researchers concluded. The researchers described the findings as "robust," meaning there was little question that the environment directly influenced the behavior of the participants. Is there anything that goes along with a messy environment that could be good?" "And then we started challenging ourselves. "We were thinking about doing a paper showing how being tidy makes people kind of do the right thing," psychologist Kathleen Vohs, lead author of a study in the journal Psychological Science, said in a telephone interview. Researchers at the University of Minnesota decided to take a look at a long-established principle of human honesty and productivity - keep your work area clean and you will be more likely to work your tail off, stay honest, be generous with your coworkers, and on and on.Ĭleanliness, after all, is next to godliness. All that clutter may be part of the reason she is so creative.įor years, we've been told that piles of personal rubbish have got to be a liability. 11, 2013 — - Here's a toast to the slob in the office, the gal with so much junk on her desk she can't find her telephone.
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