Bless This Mess

Why I love seeing other people’s desks

It’s me in a freshly tidied home office. Photo by Linda Golden.

Last Friday, jetlagged and surprisingly ahead on a few assignments, I decided to spend the workday cleaning my desk.

I meant to do this before I left town. That is, I meant to do it every day for the last six months. When I first set up my desk, I neatly arranged everything—I even organized pencils by their lead numbers. Within a week, my headphone and microphone cables were twisted around themselves. Paper press kits were stacked on top of research books with guitar picks and paperclips layered in-between. Number two pencils were in a mug with pens. The piles even spilled over to the seating. I always wanted an office with a couch in it. I had one here for a few days, but then I had an office with a couch-shaped stack of papers and books.

Some of the clutter has no clear origin. While looking for a notebook last month, I found a baseball and a harmonica.

Digging through the striations of mess is a behind-the-scenes tour of my portfolio, conducted by a therapist. Each layer is the fossil record of a story I spent hours on, a hobby I became obsessed with, or a diversion that was a little too diverting. The mess is me.

I’m not normally a messy person. I try to keep the house in order. I know where everything is in the kitchen. My albums are alphabetized. My books are organized by subject and author. When I need something, I know where to find it.

Except at work.

I’ve always worked this way. When I was a reporter in a newsroom, my desk would pile with papers that I pushed into the deepest drawer every month. When the drawer filled up, I got a bankers box from the supply room. At some point, I set my computer wallpaper to a picture of Al Gore that ran in Time Magazine in 2007.

The frog is a nice touch.

Later, I changed it to a picture of Sofia Coppola’s office that Bruce Weber took for Vogue.

Bruce Weber took this photo for Vogue.

In my downtime, I would sometimes study these pictures to see if I could tell what made up the messes. The details were always just out of focus or too pixelated on my small monitor.

Last month, on assignment for a story, I saw the preserved office of Charles and Ray Eames, transported from California to Weil-am-Rhein, Germany. I looked at it for a while, hoping its orderliness was the result of tidying for public display.

I really want to read those magazines on the desk.

I love looking at other people’s workspaces. Writing is a solitary job. When you spend so much time alone, it’s easy to wonder if you’re doing it right. You can compare your final result with someone else’s, but that’s a limited view'; it’s the scoreboard at the end of the match when what you really need to is the play-by-play. Looking at a person’s desk doesn’t show you what they did, it gives you an idea of how they did it.

Just like someone else’s work can inspire your own creativity, so can using the same tools, whether that’s the same model notebook, the same software, or the same saxophone. Did learning that Joan Didion and I apparently use similar desk chairs make me think I could write like her? No. Did it make me want to sit at my desk and try? Yes.

And that’s why I love seeing messy desks. Some days, I walk into my office and wonder how I could ever get anything done. I barely have enough room to move my mouse. But if others can do it, so can I. They’re living proof that the idea of “messy desk, messy mind” is bunk. There’s no virtue in mess, but a clean work surface isn’t something to brag about, either. There’s science that backs me up, too. Messy desks inspire novel thinking, researchers say. I wonder what their desks look like.

After a few cups of coffee (one of which I forgot about and left half-filled on my desk until I found it the next day), I finished cleaning. There were no surprises, other than the sight of the wood grain on my desk’s surface.

When I sat down Monday, my desk was clean and I set about work. My first task, spreading a few pencils and paperclips around. You know, to get my mind going.

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