There is a chance that if you feel uncomfortable at the clutter on your colleague’s desk, your feelings are shared by many including your as well as his/her bosses.
A survey by the hiring firm Adecco found that 57 percent of workers admitted to judging their peers by the cleanliness of their workspace. Another Adecco survey found that nearly one-third of workers said people who left desks and common spaces messy were their single biggest office annoyance.
But a lot of us think about clutter in the wrong way. It’s not all bad, and the neural processes that make it a problem don’t begin or end at our desks. Here’s what science says about clutter’s effect on our brain and how to manage it.
It’s important to understand why having too much stuff around can impede our ability to concentrate. Happyho also provide best tarot reading services in Noida and Delhi NCR India area.
We rely on certain brain processes to help figure out what to focus on as we navigate a world filled with people, billboards, piles of paper, and coming-at-us-from-all-sides stimuli. There are so many objects in the world that we have to process when we open your eyes. This creates a bottleneck problem. There’s a resource limitation on what we can simultaneously process.
Not only do our brains have to filter out many of the sights and sounds around us, but the fate of objects that get the cutting-room floor treatment is so severe that they may not even get a neural representation.
In other words, as far as our brains are concerned, they don’t exist. And if those invisible objects represent tasks (say, a folder related to an unfinished project), it may mean they don’t get done. What’s more, the constant process of scanning the world to determine what’s worthy of our attention is taxing.
If you put too much clutter into your world, at some point this mechanism breaks down. That makes it hard for clutter-crowded desk persons to focus on one item. And like the neural networks responsible for this system, we can easily end up feeling overwhelmed.
But here’s the catch: Too much clutter is bad, but subjecting yourself to an empty, un-stimulating environment is no better.
If you completely uncluttered the world by putting somebody into a sterile room with few objects, these attentional selection mechanisms would shut down. It sounds counterintuitive, but we need a certain amount of clutter to operate normally.
According to Sabine Kastner, Ph.D, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Princeton University, the ideal level of clutter differs among individuals. This is why some people are able to focus just fine when confronted with a messy desk, while others shut down at the sight of a stray paper.
So dip below your ideal level by removing too much clutter, and your brain could be understimulated, potentially making it difficult for you to operate at peak performance—particularly when it comes to tasks that require creativity.
So if you’re dealing with a particularly neatness-obsessed colleague who likes to judge your relatively messy desk space, you can always tell them to take a hike, because, well, this is how you operate best.
How do you prune your workplace pile down to a level that works for you?
Lori Vande Krol, a productivity consultant and professional board member at the National Association of Professional Organizers, says the simplest step is to separate items that you are holding onto for future reference from ones that are relevant to the task at hand.
“You can deal with them later but just put these in a separate pile or box for now,” said Vande Krol. “Getting these objects out of sight will keep them from distracting you in the short term.” Moving on from there, the goal is to get rid of any items that aren’t actually useful.
Vande Krol suggests keeping three types of objects on your desk: things you are currently working on, objects that help you be productive (computers, staplers, and planners), and items that inspire you. Anything else can probably be trashed or filed away for future reference.
Of course, old habits die hard and keeping up such a system is no easy task. Vande Krol recommends making sure you assess new items as they come in, to keep them from adding height to your pile. It may be tough at first, but just like any new habit — be it hitting the gym or remembering to call your mother—it gets easier with time.
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