No. 25Lifelong learning Productivity tools

Clutter blind

For most of my adult life the house was losing. Never squalid, just always slightly behind: a surface that needed clearing before I could use it, a pile that had been a pile long enough to have a name. After decades of that, it’s in order, and the thing that did it is the system in Turn Down the Tap. Less comes in, so there’s less to put away.

What I didn’t expect was the next part. I enjoy working in the home office now, and I’ve been measurably more productive there. And I can see the clutter that’s left in it. All of that was there before too, and I’d have told you the office was fine.

There’s a word for it, and it isn’t mine: clutter blind. I’d heard it before and half laughed at it, because it says so much in two words. It has been around in decluttering circles for at least twenty years. The earliest I can find is in The Life Laundry, Dawna Walter and Mark Franks’s book of the BBC series, in 2002.

We all cherry-pick

Before I defend tidiness I should admit how arguments about it usually go. We pick the conclusion first and then go looking for the study. Psychologists call it confirmation bias when it’s about what you notice and motivated reasoning when it’s about how hard you check, and the honest answer to “do I do that?” is yes. Everyone does.

Housework is the purest case, because the stakes are tiny and the permission slips are everywhere. Science says a messy desk makes you creative. Scientists say don’t make your bed. Each went round the world as a headline, and I doubt many who shared them read past the first paragraph. I’d have shared them happily myself, if they’d matched what I wanted that week.

The bed

The bed story is the older one. In January 2005 BBC News reported that untidy beds may keep us healthy, from work at Kingston University led by Dr Stephen Pretlove. Mites can’t survive the warm, dry conditions of an unmade bed, so leaving it open in the morning should keep their numbers down.

What the story actually described was a computer model of how changes in a home affect mite numbers in beds. The real-world test hadn’t happened. The next stage was going to put mite pockets into beds in 36 houses around the UK, and the story ends with a sceptical expert doubting that an unmade bed would change the humidity of a home at all. None of that made the headline. Airing the duvet for an hour is good advice. “Never make the bed” is a permission slip.

The desk

The desk story is the famous one. In 2013 Vohs, Redden and Rahinel at the University of Minnesota published three experiments in Psychological Science. In the second, 48 American students sat in one of two identical rooms, one tidy and one messy, and listed new uses for ping-pong balls. Judges who didn’t know which room the ideas had come from rated the messy room’s ideas as more creative, from about the same number of ideas.

The press release went out in August, the headlines followed, and asked about the attention, Vohs told the APA’s magazine I think messy people feel vindicated big time.

What nobody shared was the first experiment, which is the one I’d have shared. 34 Dutch students sat in either an orderly room or a messy one, were given the chance to give to charity, and were offered a snack on the way out. In the tidy room 82 per cent gave money, against 47 in the messy one, and they gave over twice as much on average. 67 per cent took the apple rather than the chocolate, against 20. The two rooms in that experiment were different rooms next door to each other, which the later ones fixed.

That’s the half I care about, because it’s the argument from Stop waiting for willpower in a lab. Nobody in the tidy room was told to resist the chocolate. The room did it for them. Environment doing the work that willpower can’t is the whole of that piece, and here it was, measured.

So I have my permission slip too, and it’s worth noticing how good it felt to find it.

The replication

In January 2019 a team at Mercy College in New York published a study built to repeat and extend the creativity finding, with a title that gives away the ending: Workspace Disorder Does Not Influence Creativity and Executive Functions. 100 people, about twice as many as Vohs’s creativity experiment, randomly assigned to a messy or an orderly desk in two identical classrooms. Two creativity tests, uses for a car tyre and the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults, plus a battery of executive-function tests.

Nothing. Not a smaller effect, not a trend in the right direction. No effect of disorder on creativity and none on executive function. The 2013 study went viral. The 2019 one didn’t.

Clutter and stress

The study people reach for on the other side is Saxbe and Repetti, and I reach for it too, so let me be straight about it. 30 dual-income couples in the US, 60 people, each spouse walking a camera round the house giving a tour. The researchers counted the words. Wives who used more clutter words and more “unfinished” words had flatter cortisol across the day, where it normally falls from morning to night, and low mood that rose through the day. Wives who described a restful home showed the opposite. It held after controlling for marital satisfaction and neuroticism.

Now the other column. It’s correlational: stressed people may describe their homes more harshly, or keep less pleasant ones. It’s small. And the husbands’ results were largely null, which is the easiest part to leave out. The direction is the one I’d like it to be, and that is exactly when I should be slowest to believe it.

Fig. 1 · What went viral, what the evidence says

The headline, and the half nobody shared. Two of the three permission slips fall over when checked. The third stands, but only just, and only for the wives.

What a collector means by clutter

There’s a reason I can hold both of those positions without flinching, and it’s that I collect things. Mainstream decluttering advice treats every object as a problem, which is why a shelf of Transformers reads as a confession to most of the people who write it. It isn’t. A shelf of figures arranged the way you like them is a display, and I’d no more call it clutter than call a bookcase clutter. I made the longer case in It was never about the stuff.

Clutter is the stuff without a home. The post on the chair. The box you’ve been meaning to open. The thing you stepped over for a year. That’s the kind Saxbe and Repetti’s wives were describing with their “unfinished” words, and it’s the kind you stop seeing. Nobody goes blind to their display. They go blind to the pile beside it.

Why one clear room matters

Which brings me back to the office. I don’t think the stuff in it got worse. I think the rest of the house got better and the contrast came back. You stop noticing anything that is always there, the way you stop hearing a fridge, and a pile that has sat in the same place for a year has become part of the room. It’s still costing something. A small brain-imaging study of 10 people looking at simple shapes found that things in view compete for the visual brain’s limited processing, and that grouping them eases it. That didn’t study messy rooms and I won’t pretend it did. But I don’t need it to notice that I’m sharper at a clear desk than at a cluttered one.

One clear room is what lets you see the next one.

So one clear room is what lets you see the next one. The rest of the house being right is what made the office look wrong, and the office being right will, I expect, show me something else in the house I’ve walked past for years. Habituation doesn’t go away because you’ve read about it. It goes away because something nearby changed.

Both ways

This is the part I’d rather skip and shouldn’t. Everything above is also a story I wanted to be true. I like a tidy room, I wrote a book that says so, and I’ve just handed you one experiment in which a tidy room made people kinder and healthier, one correlational study that works only for the wives, and my own office, which is a sample of one with the experimenter living in it. If a stranger sent me that as proof that mess is bad for you, I’d call it thin.

What I’d say it supports is narrower, and I think more useful. The room you work in changes what you do in it, in ways you don’t notice and can’t willpower your way past. That holds up across the no-willpower research and across the useful half of Vohs. Whether the mess itself makes you dull or stressed is a weaker claim with weaker evidence, and I’ll hold it loosely.

What I’d actually do

Set the room up for the person you’ll be at four in the afternoon, not the one you are now with the coffee in your hand. Keep the display and clear the pile, because they’re different things and only one of them is quietly charging you. Clear one room properly and let it show you the next.

And be suspicious of any single study that tells you what you wanted to hear. The messy desk one, if that’s your side. The tidy room one, if it’s mine. The study that agrees with you is the one you’ll never think to check, which is why it’s the one that most needs checking.