Are creative people also messy people? If you want to be more creative, should you mimic the great artists and thinkers and let your stuff pile up?
It’s a common belief that being creative is linked to being a slob. This always seemed like common sense to me. I knew a highly creative couple of schoolteachers who were major hoarders. They collected everything to the point that their entire house was filled from floor to ceiling with stuff. Everywhere one looked there was old furniture, unique artifacts, and curiosities. Every horizontal surface was covered in piles of papers, magazines, and books, and unfinished (or “in process” if you wish) artwork. A dozen creatures, both animal and human, navigated the maze-like house daily.
It was definitely an interesting place to visit, as disordered and messy as it was. There was something new or something cool around every corner, even if you had to move five boxes of antique Christmas ornaments and three stacks of National Geographic every time you wanted to use the computer. Which, by the way, was located within easy reach of the disks for Macintosh System 6.0.4 (dating back to 1988 for crying out loud!) and hundreds of other outdated manuals and disks.
They were very creative people, always starting new projects and coming up with new ideas. They were fun to be around, and naturally their students loved them.
The scene brings to mind a famous Albert Einstein quote: “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, then what are we to think of an empty desk?”
You don’t want an empty mind, do you?
Creativity and Efficacy Are Not the Same Thing
So it seems that being messy might correlate with being creative. Maybe it does, but it is not the whole story.
My teacher friends may have been creative, living in highly interesting but messy surroundings that reflected their ideas and desires. The downside is that they were also very unfocused. They hardly produced anything, and certainly not at the rate their skill and imagination suggested was possible.
This is because creativity is hard work, and to do work, you need to focus.
Many people believe that creativity is a black art — an idea brought to you by angels, or somehow delivered from another realm of thought or existence. Those who have it, just have it, and they seem to do it so easily, as though their own minds are not even involved.
This is untrue. Creativity comes from your own ability to think and focus in this reality.
You can’t just stop at being creative. It’s easy to come up with ideas, to delight in thinking, to do it playfully. To sit down and work and make it real is the most important part of the creative process. You know that old line by Thomas Edison about success being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration? It may be a cliché, but it’s perfectly true.
Edison’s quip bears repeating because so many people like to believe the opposite: that creative and successful people have a mystical connection to some “higher” consciousness. If you don’t buy all the new age nonsense, then you can choose to believe that creative people are simply born that way.
To turn those wonderful ideas into reality requires an enormous amount of hard work and focus. It is a very conscious process, not something “instinctual” or “intuitional.” Merely being creative is not enough; one must also be productive and effective if he is to do anything useful with his great ideas.
Einstein’s Messy Desk
Back to the messy desk. According to the fallacious line of thinking discussed above, whatever weird conditions creative people seem to need must be okay. If they need to work next to a mountain of papers, so be it, as long as the ideas keep flowing.
It just isn’t so. A messy desk or a messy room is a real deterrent to getting work done. A mess prevents you from finding and using the tools or items you need.
Ever hear a messy office dweller exclaim from behind three desks piled high with paper: “But I know where everything is. I can find anything in half a minute.” It might even be true. Just think, however, of all the mental RAM wasted on remembering where and in what pile decades old reports are sitting. A bookshelf or a filing system remembers those things for you, freeing up your mind for useful tasks.
Suppose you don’t like filing. I don’t. I hate any kind of secretarial grunt-work. I want to reduce the time I spend sorting things to the absolute minimum. That’s why I reduce the build-up of that stuff in the first place. For example, I never take a receipt from a store unless it is a business expense requiring documentation or an otherwise important purchase. The business receipts are scanned into the computer every few months and the originals are destroyed. It takes only a small amount of effort to manage this: mostly I just say “no” to unnecessary papers. I never think about where papers are, not even for a second. The mess apologists never do a good job of explaining how having old bills and brochures and junk around sustains or enhances creativity.
Then there is the issue of relevance. Of all the stuff that surrounds a messy person, how much of it is related to the work he is doing at that moment? A person does not require five old phonebooks, one hundred pens, and stacks and stacks of books to be close at hand to sit down and do some real work.
The focused mind decides what it wants — to write an article, say — and proceeds to do it. The unfocused mind decides — if it does at all — but gets distracted by the hundreds of other ideas and stimuli that surround it.
Remember, being creative and effective requires you to focus. A room that you can’t walk through or a desk that you can’t work on is the perfect sign of an unfocused mind.
What About the Outliers?
What about people who are creative, productive, and messy all at the same time? Doesn’t it contradict my idea? Not at all. I know that I, myself, cannot have all three simultaneously. My periods of messiness do not correlate with productivity at all. Perhaps those people who seem to manage all three traits are not functioning as well as they could if they were more organized. Also, the supposed link between messiness and creativity can be used as an excuse to remain disorganized.
The benefits of establishing order in your physical world are similar to the benefits of establishing order in your mental world via a system like Getting Things Done. For those who may not know, GTD is in essence a habit of putting all the things in your mind, such as ideas, to do items, appointments, and so on, into a trusted system like a paper list or a computer program. The exact nature of the system is not important. The power of GTD is in freeing up your mental RAM to focus on what counts, rather than on thousands of other things that may be important but are not relevant in that moment.
Many people, myself included, can attest that GTD works. Yet there are many productive people who don’t use it. It does not stand to reason that a lack of GTD is the cause of their productivity. Rather, they would probably do even better if they were using a GTD system. Same goes with creativity, productivity, and messiness. Many people juggle all three and seem to do all right. Given the virtues of bringing focus to your physical world as well as your mental world, I bet those people would do even better if they got the office cleaned up.
Achieve Balance Between Order and Disorder
Does all of this mean that you can’t be productive until every little thing is in its place? Of course not. There is a point at which increased organization brings diminishing returns. If you have boxes of post-it notes labeled and categorized by Pantone color, you’re probably too organized. On the other end of the scale, if you can’t walk through your room, can’t find anything on your desk, or sit in a computer chair that you can’t move because it’s surrounded by junk, then you have a major problem.
It is true that the very mundane task of staying organized keeps you, in that moment, from doing what you really want to do. Though it may be hard to get organized, keep in mind the long term benefits of reducing clutter and distractions and of paving the way for work requiring concentration.
To make it simpler, try to find the point on the organization slope where you get the most benefit from the least amount of effort.
The ideal is to be able to see your floor. To have all your books on the bookshelf — but not necessarily in alphabetical order. To be able to use your desk as a desk — but if you need a junk drawer for your miscellaneous items, then have one. Don’t spend three hours sorting through a shoebox full of five hundred little things — in most cases, that would be a waste of time. If you take care of the big tasks, like putting your books where they belong and clearing a path to the door, that junk drawer just begging to be sorted can wait for a rainy day (if it’s worth your time at all).
Find the right balance between order and disorder. To be perfectly ordered all the time, for most of us, would require an enormous effort that would leave little time for anything else. Yet to be entirely disordered is to be unfocused and lazy. Not only does it physically slow you down and prevent productivity, but it is a reflection of your disordered inner state. To Einstein I would say, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, then an empty desk is a sign of a mind that got its work done because it could focus.”
It really does not take much effort to clean the room or clear the desk. You can easily achieve a functional state of orderliness without investing the incredible amount of energy and time required to be perfectly organized. Don’t rely on the supposed link between messiness and creativity as an excuse to be a slob. Make your physical world reflect your ideal mental state.
If you want to be more creative, then get focused and get to work.
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