Timharford.com Website Review

My daughter is about to receive a new desk, so in order to clear space for it we were obliged to hack our way through the undergrowth of a 12-year-old’s bedroom. We found a half-as*embled jigsaw puzzle from last Christmas; three separate sets of worn pyjamas scrunched up and stored in diverse locations; and empty sweet wrappers from Halloween. More alarmingly, there were empty sweet wrappers from Easter. I am trying my best to treat with equanimity the discovery of a novel ecosystem under my roof. This is because I have come to believe that many spaces work a great deal better if subjected to a sustained period of benign neglect. Consider the office cubicle. Some people pile their desks with everything from old newspapers to unwashed mugs; others are fastidiously tidy. (I fluctuate.) I’m not saying that people with messy desks are more productive, although there’s some evidence messy-desker then he or she should be allowed to get on with it. Support for this position comes from a study conducted by two psychologists, Alex Haslam and Craig Knight. A few years ago they set up simple office spaces in which they asked experimental subjects to spend an hour doing administrative tasks. Messrs Haslam and Knight wanted to understand what made people productive and happy, and they tested four arrangements in a randomised trial. One was minimalist: chair, desk, bare walls. A second was softened with tasteful prints and some greenery. Workers were happier there, and got more done. The kicker comes with the third and fourth arrangements. In each case, workers were invited to rearrange the pictures and pot-plants as they wished before settling down to work. But while some were then left to their labours, others were second-guessed by an experimenter who This, unsurprisingly, drove people mad. “I wanted to hit you,” one participant later admitted. Empowering people to lay out their own space led to happier, more productive workers. St*ipped of that freedom, everyone’s productivity fell and some felt quite ill.