When I was crammed for college graduation, my room would have looked like a bit of a natural disaster to anyone who entered. Coffee cups everywhere. Piles of paper on the desk, on the floor, on the bed.
None of them were a mess to me. Each stack had a logic that made perfect sense internally, even if it didn’t make sense to anyone else. It was the version of my brain that got me through most exams.
Then I left university and went into finance and the work environment became much more organized. Clean table, I ordered everything. Like most people entering a grown-up workplace for the first time, I quietly absorbed the idea that this was an upgrade. A clean desk meant a clean mind. Just as you organized the outside, you organized the inside. I’ve been keeping my work surfaces tidy ever since and assumed this was the more mature way of thinking.
But a 2013 study has been quietly nagging me ever since I came across it. And as it turns out, a 2019 paper I found only later usefully complicates the story.
What the 2013 study found
THE original work It was led by Kathleen Vohs, a professor at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. Vohs and her co-authors conducted three experiments using one consistent setting: some participants worked in an orderly room, others in a room strewn with books and papers, and the researchers measured what they did.
The results as summarized in the American Psychological Association’s Monitorsplit in two directions.
In the first experiment, after completing a few questionnaires, participants were given the option of donating to charity and choosing a snack when they left. The tidy room won that round. According to the Monitor summary, “82 percent of participants in the tidy room donated money, compared to 47 percent in the messy room. Also, 67 percent of participants in the tidy room chose apples over chocolate, while only 20 percent of participants in the messy room made the healthy choice.”
The clean room was where people did what we might call virtuous. They gave more. They ate better.
The second experiment changed the results. People were asked to come up with novel uses for a ping pong ball. Both rooms generated the same number of ideas. The difference was qualitative—as the Monitor reported, “a panel of independent raters rated the ideas of participants in the messy room as significantly more creative.”
A third experiment with 188 participants found a similar pattern in a different area. People in the tidy room were reaching for the products labeled “classic”. People in the messy room were reaching for products marked “new”. Order drew people towards the established; confusion drove them towards the novel.
What subsequent research suggested
The Vohs article sometimes had media attention psychology results that are a bit uncomfortable in hindsight because the finding of central creativity did not remain clear when researchers tried to replicate it.
In 2019, a team led by Sarah Marsh attempted conceptual replication Frontiers in Psychology. Their results were dull. As they put it, “no effect of workspace clutter on cognitive performance was found.”
This does not prove that the original finding was wrong. The two studies used different measures of creativity and different participants, and one failed replication does not mean the end of the literature. The honest version is that a well-known study found an effect, a follow-up did not.
Two different rooms for two different jobs, as a trial run
If we take the two papers together, the picture is more cautious than the one painted by the Vohs press cycle. There is evidence that tidy environments encourage people to engage in traditional, responsible behavior—the donation and snacking results from Vohs’ Experiment 1 are quite clear, even if the sample is small. The case that disordered environments enhance creativity is the weaker branch of the original argument, and it is the leg that the replication does not support.
A modest version of the takeaway, which we think survives in the literature: orderliness is likely to drive behavior toward the expected and rule-following; Clutter may or may not lead the mind to the novel, and the magnitude of such effects is uncertain enough that no one is redesigning their workspace on the strength of it.
Which I think I did wrong
Back to all that, it didn’t quite provide the clean reframing of my years of living to the brim that I had hoped for when I first read Vohs. The mess was probably not a deliberate optimization of the creative parts of exam preparation. This is probably what happens when a tired student stops cleaning. Whether the environment helped or I just passed the exams is not really a question for the research to answer.
What has changed is narrower. I stopped treating the cleanliness of my workspace as a measure of how well my work was going. Financial years provided a value (tidy = serious) that probably seeped into the work, where the value doesn’t necessarily apply. The Vohs and Marsh papers together do not give me a new rule to follow. They give me permission not to treat an old one as if it were a rule at all.
I will not let coffee cups pile up on my desk on purpose. The honest price of a perpetually messy desk—fewer good habits, less responsible things, less responsibility, the slow drag of a visually noisy environment—is itself real, regardless of what the literature on creativity shows or doesn’t show. But the evidence suggests that desk cleanliness and work quality are more loosely related than the clean desk culture I propose.
