How does clutter affect productivity and what to do about it?

Where does the mess come from?

… he walked every day through the streets of his village, looked under the bridges, under the rungs and everything that he came across: an old sole, a woman's rag, an iron nail, a clay crock - he dragged everything to him …

N. V. Gogol "Dead Souls"

Each of us is a little Plyushkin. Humanity has gone astray: you need to love people, but use things. But we do everything the other way around.

We are so anxious about the objects of the material world that we do not notice how we are overgrown with rubbish. "Don't throw this box away: it will still come in handy!""

This is how disorder is born. The truth is, the box will never wait for its finest hour, we will not find use for bullshit with eBay, and a good book will not be read. These are unnecessary things, but the brain will never accept it.

Researchers at Yale University established Why It’s Hard to Let Go of Clutter that the same areas of the brain are responsible for the process of “goodbye” to things as for physical pain (the anterior cingulate gyrus and islet). In accordance with this, the more expensive this or that item is for us (the more money we paid for it, the brighter the memories it evokes, and so on), the more difficult it is to part with it.

In addition, scientists have proven that physical contact exacerbates emotional attachment. In other words, what we touch and hold in our hands is harder to throw away (you must admit that everything is much easier with computer files).

This is proved by a simple experiment The power of touch: An examination of the effect of duration of physical contact on the valuation of objects. People were given coffee cups and asked to hold them in their hands for a while. Then there was an auction where these same mugs were sold. It turned out that the longer the dish was with the participant, the more money he was willing to pay for it.

By the way, marketers and advertisers take advantage of this feature. In electronics stores, we are persistently offered to hold gadgets in our hands, because they know that physical contact can provoke a purchase.

Thus, disorder is generated by two human characteristics: physiological (the parts of the brain responsible for pain are activated) and psychological (tactile sensations contribute to the development of attachment to an object). This leads to the accumulation of things.

How clutter affects a person

Chaos on your desk, room, or closet can negatively impact your focus and productivity.

This conclusion was reached by Scientists find physical clutter negatively affects your ability to focus, process information by scientists at Princeton University, studying the performance of people in an organized and unorganized space. It turns out that clutter kills attention, which in turn leads to stress and decreased productivity. Just as multitasking paralyzes our brains, clutter paralyzes our productivity.

It is noteworthy that not only physical but also digital clutter reduces efficiency. A blockage in mail, 17 open tabs, a lot of icons on the desktop - all this is also unsettling.

According to Mark Hirst, founder of a marketing and personal productivity consulting firm and author of a book on digital literacy, digital chaos affects productivity in the same way as apartment clutter. At least, both of them lead to the inability to:

process information;
remember it;
quickly switch between tasks.

This is another reason for having a digital weekend.

How to get rid of the clutter

If you think that the cure for a disease called "disorder" is cleaning, you are wrong. Cleaning is only a temporary measure. It is necessary to eliminate the sources that feed the disorder.

5 steps to order

Dealing with creative clutter

If a mess on a table means a mess in your head, then what does an empty table mean?

Albert Einstein

Despite all scientific evidence, some people need a mess. Surprisingly, randomly scattered items and unsorted papers can be a sign of simmering activity.

We commonly refer to this phenomenon as creative disorder. It is believed that creative people are so passionate about their ideas that they do not even notice the chaos around them.

A prime example is Alan Turing. Clutter has become one of the secrets of his productivity. His desk was always littered with papers, Turing could at any moment rush to him to write down on the first piece of paper that came to him.