 It really bugs me when house guests leave their stuff all over my bathroom counter. If you ask me, anyone who does that is messed up in the head. Happy New Year! For many, January 1st is a good arbitrary starting point for cultivating new habits. Popular resolutions include exercising more, reading more books, and, in my case, getting organized, being more diligent about keeping one's space tidy. It's common to feel some amount of stress or shame about failing to maintain a neat home or office. Lots of people struggle with it their whole lives. Benjamin Franklin is famous for his meticulously documented scientific approach to self-improvement, but despite his best efforts, he was haunted by his messy demeanor for more than 60 years. His home, perpetually littered with important papers and objects, strewn over every horizontal surface that would hold them, from his desk to his dining room table to the floor. Ben's unruly nature didn't prevent him from achieving way more over the course of his life than most of us ever will, but many would lament his disorderly manner as a tragic character flaw rather than a personality quirk. Some feel that properly virtuous individuals will be steadfast in their commitment to keeping their possessions and their home well-ordered, and stashing drafts of the Declaration of Independence on the mantle wouldn't cut it. If you ask some cognitive linguists, this moralizing attitude may be partially fueled by a sort of conceptual bait-and-switch. You may have noticed that the language of cleanliness and order works just as well for describing habits of hygiene or personal integrity. If I describe someone as filthy, unclean, nasty, vile, or tainted, I might be describing some sort of evil child murderer or someone who needs to wash their shirt. The conceptual metaphor theory suggests that we often develop our understanding of abstract ideas, like morality, by building those concepts out of more basic visceral experiences. If you're trying to convey the abstract idea of honor to a five-year-old, you might use a metaphor of a pure white cloth that gets stained and can never recover its original brightness. That's pretty easy to understand and conveys many important aspects of the idea. But as a side effect, because the notion of honor is now built out of this mental image of unstained cloth, they may stumble into funny ideas that are more about that association than anything else. Many movies employ a visual language of unblemished white clothing to convey an impression of a character's honor or purity. Conceptual metaphor theory might point to a reason that symbolism is so universal and effective. It might also help to explain why we get so bent out of shape about keeping things tidy, like it's a moral imperative on the order of don't murder people. When we think of abstractions like virtue or righteousness, it seems plausible that we've built those concepts on our more concrete experiences of cleanliness and neatness. If we don't examine that association critically, Benjamin Franklin's penchant for keeping important papers on the floor might start to seem like a sort of sinful vice rather than a quirky workflow. Some real-world observations lend additional weight to skepticism about the spiritual or essential significance of keeping tidy. In 2001, Steve Whitaker and Julia Hirschberg took a close look at how desk workers treat their paper documents and how those tendencies affect their capacity to get stuff done. According to a number of previous studies, most office workers can be sorted into two groups based on their paper management strategies. Filers tend to categorize and sort documents into an organizational structure, like folders that they keep in a filing cabinet or binders that they keep on a shelf, ensuring that their actual workspace is clear of paper. Pilers, on the other hand, tend to keep important documents visible on their desk in a few loose stacks, sorting and resorting them according to whatever organizing principle they may need in the moment. Surprisingly, Whitaker and Hirschberg found that filers tend to accumulate more crap than their filing coworkers, almost twice as much, and don't consult that information nearly as often. They hold on to older obsolete data for longer, and here's the kicker. They tend to be less productive on average, burning a great deal of time and energy on the overhead necessary to maintain and search their archives for whatever they might need. Now, before you go patting yourself on the back for your messy desk, there's a great deal of variance within and overlap between the groups. It's not like either strategy is predictive of success or failure on its own. But these results do fly in the face of some cultural assumptions about what an effective employee looks like. It makes some amount of sense if you think about it. If you have to stare at the physical documents you're choosing to keep, you're going to be pickier about what you hold on to. Having them readily accessible probably means you'll be more likely to read them. Piles are actually a robust organizational tool that doesn't require a lot of overhead. Stuff you use regularly will rise to the top, stuff you don't use will language at the bottom, or it can be easily peeled off and trashed. On the other hand, filing requires you to predict with incredible accuracy what sorts of documents you're going to get and what categories will be useful for finding them in the future, creating confusion and frustration if you happen to guess wrong. Should this engineering drawing with the cost estimates scribbled in the margin go in the accounting folder or the engineering folder? Should I copy it and slow down my search speed in both places? It seems that surface level orderliness can sometimes conceal a haphazard mountain of crap duplicated and stuffed into a folder structure that hasn't really survived first contact with the enemy. And that a visually cluttered desk, well unpleasant to look at, may be a very effective tool for information management. Many self-help gurus and TV personalities espouse a common sentiment that keeping your space free of clutter will have a sympathetic harmonizing effect on other aspects of your life, improving your emotional well-being, lowering your stress, boosting your confidence and mood. But what if you're a pillar who works best when your paperwork is spread out over your desk? It seems like getting rid of your piles to appease the Marie Kondo's of the world might feel satisfying in the short term, but crippling your optimal workflow seems like it would make you more stressed and less confident in the long run as you continually try to wrestle your piling tendencies into submission the way Franklin did. It seems plausible that our knee-jerk distaste for a visually cluttered workspace might just come from those weird conceptual associations rather than any meaningful issues with a piler's methodology. We've also talked a little about how empty space can be a signifier of class or wealth. Maybe we feel worse than we should when looking at or living in a cluttered space because we've been trained to associate visually disordered belongings with poverty and dysfunction. If we try to crowbar apart the pragmatic benefits of keeping things tidy from those contingent cultural and psychological associations, there are some advantages that are indisputable. It's easier to clean surfaces that don't have things on them. Storing objects prevents them from getting in the way or damaged. Having some empty space in which you can place a thing rather than needing to move something else out of the way first is extraordinarily useful. But I think many of the most compelling reasons to keep things tidy aren't really aspects of individual productivity. They're more about sharing our space with others. Imagine cooking in a communal kitchen. If or just you throwing around various appliances and tools, it would be pretty easy to find what you need or remember where you left it, even if you don't take the time to put things away when you're done using them. But when you're sharing those tools, restoring them to their proper place becomes critical. It's easy to find a knife if the last person who used it replaced it on the knife block the moment they didn't need it. It's much harder if you have to guess who might have used it last and where they might have put it to keep it accessible. Trying to work around someone else's clutter is also considerably more challenging and stressful than negotiating your own mess because you don't have their contextual understanding of where everything is and why, if there even is a why. Is this thing on the counter important? If I move it, will it disrupt someone's workflow? Or is it some random bit of garbage that hasn't found its way to the trash yet? Clutter can also tie up resources and tools in a way that is exponentially more disruptive for a group of people sharing a space than it is for an individual. When the sink is full of dirty dishes, it's not just gross to look at. It makes it impossible to use the sink for sink stuff, like filling pots with water, rinsing out jars, or perhaps most frustratingly, washing dishes. If there's only one person using the kitchen, it takes the same amount of time to wash the dishes whenever they decide to do it. They could leave the sink totally packed until just before they need to use it, wash everything then, and be no worse off. But in a shared kitchen, even if someone volunteers to wash up everyone else's mess, the sink will be inoperative during that time, and everyone who needs it will have to sit around twiddling their thumbs, potentially preventing someone else from making progress by occupying some other bit of the kitchen. At some point, putting off tidying essentially monopolizes the space you're supposed to be sharing, as though you're the only one who needs to use it, preventing others from making progress on their own work. The notion that cleanliness is next to godliness is deep in the cultural zeitgeist, but I think it's probably useful to separate the practical benefits of keeping things squared away from the weird aesthetic and effective reactions we've been trained to experience around clutter. If, like me, you're hoping to use the New Year as an excuse to cultivate some new habits and stop tripping over your own stuff, instead of feeling like some sort of reprobate every time you fail to make your bed or notice that your desk has gotten a little crowded, maybe actively considering what practical trade-offs are being made could allow us to prioritize, invest in, and feel good about the tidying that actually facilitates our goals, and the goals of those who we share our lives, tools, and workspace with. For example, if your spouse is getting annoyed at all your little toys and doodads laying around because you don't really have a dedicated spot for them, maybe you could start a YouTube show and store them in the background. Just a thought. Do you think tidiness might be overblown as an individual virtue? Do you think it makes more sense in the context of social responsibility? Please, leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. 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