Before you clean and organize your office consider two competing studies on the topic. 48 subjects at the University of Minnesota were individually taken into two types of rooms – messy and neat – and then asked to come up with new uses for a ping pong ball. The participants in the messy room were judged to be 28% more creative. Meanwhile at Temple University a similar study discovered that people working in a neat office persisted longer on a difficult task.
The upshot? Messy seems to inspire us to think outside the box, while at the same time draining us of our grit and determination. Which do you need more? How well you organize your office could help you move in the right direction. These studies were reported by Clive Thompson in the March 2016 issue of Wired. Zohar Lazar created the illustration.
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