Industrial psychologist Andrew DuBrin at the Rochester Institute of Technology has noted, "Whenever you see a photo of a powerful person, the person always has a clean work area."  He's right, of course; a Fortune 500 CEO or U.S. senator posing in front of a desk surface obliterated by heaps of paper would risk being judged ineffective and undisciplined.  If nothing else, the failure to keep a neat desk suggests vague, non-leadership-compatible issues of character, in much the same way that divorce did until about the 1970s.
     To be sure, CEOs and senators usually have assistants to help them keep their desks clear.  But in the worlds of business and government, at least, it's not just people at the top who might feel pressured to maintain tidy desks.  Organizational policy, written or unwritten, tends to be unfriendly to the cluttered desk.  General Motors and United Parcel Service are among the many U.S. companies with formal "clean-desk" policies; The New York Times is among those without one, but that wasn't much comfort to staffers said to have been frostily instructed by former editor Howell Raines on the proper technique for stacking books on their desks.  (Horizontally, in his opinion.)  Some organizations go ahead and proudly spell out policies in black and white on their websites so the public can appreciate the pride employees take in being told what to do with their desktops.  The following is excerpted from the "code of business," posted on the Web by Iowa-based bank First Federal Bankshares:
     Work areas should be kept neat and orderly. The Company must always look its best. Just as we are judged by our personal appearance, so is the Company. Good housekeeping makes it easier to organize your work, prevents loss of items, and provides a professional appearance. Excessive display of personal items is unprofessional. Supervisors and managers are expected to maintain a professional appearance in their departments and areas, and they may request that you remove items if they detract from a professional appearance. In addition, they may require you to clean or straighten your work area.
     And these sorts of policies, whether formal or not, aren't always just gentle suggestions.  There's no way of knowing how many times messy desks have played a role in hampering careers.  But some institutions are explicit about the price of messiness.  Bradford, Pennsylvania, fired its police chief for not having a neat desk.  Australia's postal service demoted an employee and fined her US$2,300 for refusing to remove from her desk a photograph of herself with friends--her fourth personal item, one more than the agency allows. 
     Fortunately for the world, Albert Einstein did not work for UPS or the city of Bradford.  Einstein's desk at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., was by all personal and photographic accounts maintained in stupendous disarray.  (Einstein makes a good role model here not simply because he is so widely accepted as having been highly effective at his job, but also because, as we'll soon see, Einstein might be regarded as a sort of godfather of the science of useful mess.)
     In general, if one looks at organizations where people tend not to have neat-freak managers breathing down their necks--in other words, where they have a choice in the matter--people tend to have messy desks.  Our survey backs this up, as do professional organizers.  In particular, academia is an unrestrained haven of the messy workspace, so much so that faculty at colleges and universities often behave as if they've been told their reputation will grow in direct proportion to piles on and around their desks.  One Columbia University professor's office has gradually become so densely packed with towers of papers and books that the school finally assigned him a second office so that students could meet with him in relative comfort and safety.  When Nobel laureate and University of Chicago economics professor Robert Fogel found his desk becoming massively piled he simply installed a second desk behind him that now competes in towering clutter with the first.  His colleague at the school, chemist Stephen Berry, a recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant award, works among a landscape of 18-inch-high piles which have harbored individual documents for as long as two decades.
     Well, perhaps messy desks are the stuff of cranky genius.  Maybe these folks would have been even more productive if they had followed conventional get-organized wisdom and sought out the promised timesaving efficiency and functionality of neat desks.  Except when people study working efficiency, as for example did husband-and-wife Microsoft Senior Researchers Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, authors of The Myth of the Paperless Office, they tend to find that messy desks can offer extremely functional environments.  Academic types defending the practices of academic types?  Actually, it doesn't take a genius to figure out why it makes perfect sense to keep a messy desk.
     First, there's the cost of maintaining a neat desk.  To keep a desk surface free of papers, except perhaps for small "In" and "Out" piles, you've got to get most incoming documents either filed away, thrown out, or handed off to someone else.  (Let's assume you're not just shuffling them off into other piles on your floor or in your closet, since that would hardly be getting organized.)  You can stick them into files in a filing cabinet, which would look pretty neat.  But it takes time to read through and appropriately file each document if you want to be able to access it when you need it, and if you want to be able to keep track of which documents are associated with what incomplete tasks and what sorts of deadlines.
     In addition, you'll be spending time each day searching through files, struggling in some cases to figure out where you filed a document and which documents need immediate attention.  (We'll be talking later on about the difficulties that filing systems can cause in retrieving documents, but a quick example: If you have a higher-priority item and a lower-priority item relating to, say, the same client, should you file them together in the client folder, or separately in more-urgent and less-urgent folders?)  If and when you find the right documents, you'll be pulling them out and shuffling them back onto your desk so you can work with them, and then later refiling them.  How much time you spend on your filing and retrieving each day will vary wildly with work complexity and the volume and types of documents you receive, but whatever it amounts to, it's time you'll be taking away from getting real work done.
     Or you could follow the advice of many professional organizers and adhere to a "one-touch" policy for documents--whatever task is associated with the document, get it done right away, so you can file it and forget it or chuck it out or pass it along.  It certainly sounds like a good idea to go ahead and get the work done as it comes in, since you have to get it done anyway sooner or later.  Except, of course, you really don't have to get all the work that comes onto your desk done; a lot of it would have eventually ended up proving safely ignorable.  What's more, some of it will be of much higher time urgency than the rest.  But under a strict one-touch system, you'll find yourself spending time dealing with office-supply forms and seminar flyers even when that career-making-or-breaking report to the managers is due in three days.  Of course, you don't necessarily have to be rigid about the one-touch system.  Surely it's no problem if you take some of these less-important documents and place them over here at a corner of your desk just until the report is done.  And even though this other document is pretty important, you don't have to deal with it right this second and interrupt your thoughts, so you'll just slide it over here and....uh oh.
     A messy desk can be a highly effective prioritizing and accessing system.  People with messy desks enlist any number of different strategies, often unconsciously, for keeping the work they need at hand.  In general, a messy desk tends to end up so that the more important, more urgent work stays close by and near the top of the clutter, while the safely ignorable stuff tends to get buried near the back--which makes perfect sense.  And yes, you'll spend a certain amount of time rooting through the piles to find documents.  This is where professional organizers claim you'll lose anywhere from an hour a week to an hour a day.  But in fact as long as the mess is kept to a reasonable level you'll probably do better time-wise than you would with a neat desk.  First of all, the documents you most need will tend to be at hand anyway.  According to our survey, people who said they keep a "very neat" desk spend an average of 36 percent more time looking for things at work than people who said they keep a "fairly messy" desk.  And that figure doesn't take into account how much additional time those with neat desks spend sorting and filing, or processing low-priority documents, in order to keep their desks so neat.
     The various piles on a messy desk can represent a surprisingly sophisticated informal filing system that offers far more efficiency and flexibility than a filing cabinet could possibly provide.  Messy desk owners typically, for example, have separate piles for urgent, less-urgent, and non-urgent documents.  Within any one of those piles you could keep together documents relating to, say, the same client.  If you want to draw special attention to a document within the pile, you can displace or twist it so it sticks out.  If a document could reasonably go into either of two piles, you can place it so it straddles both piles.  If you have to find a document, you not only can track it down by urgency and client, but also by how long it's been since you last saw the document, and what other documents came in around the same time, since the older, less-handled stuff is likely to be together closer to the bottom.  If you keep a messy desk, some of these strategies probably sound familiar, though you may have never thought about the method to your clutter.  And, as Sellen and Harper have pointed out, that's one of the great characteristics of a messy desk: It will tend to naturally reflect the way you think and work.  Thought and work are unpredictable, varying and ambiguous.  They're messy.  Why shouldn't your desk be messy, too?
     And a few more advantages.  How many times have you waded through a pile of papers on your desk to look for a particular document only to stumble on a different one, inspiring you to accomplish an even more important task than you had originally intended--a task you never would have gotten to if you had safely filed that document away in a drawer?  Even more satisfying can be the experience of coming across something in a pile that rings a bell with regard to something else you saw on your desk a few minutes ago, or in the previous day's rummaging, facilitating a useful connection.
     That's what happened to Leon Heppel, a biomolecular researcher at the National Institute of Health in the 1950s.  Heppel was notorious among his fellow researchers for the clutter on his desk, which he would occasionally cover with a sheet of brown wrapping paper so that he would have a clean surface on which to deposit a new layer of clutter.  One day he came across a letter sent to him by researcher Earl Sutherland describing Sutherland's recent work with an unusual biomolecule and its effect on cells.  Later, digging through wrapper levels, Heppel came across a letter than had been sent to him earlier on by the researcher David Lipkin, in which Lipkin described the action of a different biomolecule.  Regarding the two letters side-by-side, Heppel realized his two colleagues were very likely describing different ends of the same cellular process.  He forwarded Sutherland's letter to Lipkin and vice-versa, setting off a chain reaction of insights that ended with Sutherland's Nobel-Prize-winning discovery of how hormones regulate cells.
     Perhaps all this helps explain why, according to a survey conducted by professional staffing firm Ajilon Office, office messiness tends to increase sharply with increasing education, increasing salary and increasing experience.
     More than one professional organizer commented at the NAPO conference that the right attitudes about organization ought to be taught in elementary school.  Good idea.  An excellent example emerged from a recent visit to a fifth-grade public-school class boasting rows of pristine desks and a spotless floor space all unmarred by even a hint of clutter, except for one desk near the back of the room that had a teetering pile of clutter on the floor beside it.  When asked about the pile the teacher laughed, and explained that she had a rule: The students can keep anything they want at their desks, as long as it all fits inside their desks at the end of the day.  But one student seemed to fall short of the goal every day by about a seven-inch stack--he always had a few extra books, a pile of art in progress, several puzzles, and more.  A daily struggle between the teacher and student ensued, until after a few weeks the teacher had an epiphany.  "I realized this wasn't about discipline," she said.  "It was about curiosity.  He just found all this stuff really interesting.  And why are these kids here?  To be neat?  Or to be stimulated?  I told him he could keep the extra things in a pile by his desk, and we haven't had a problem since."