Messy Desks are Encouraged
Working from home has increased our productivity
We are coming into the last few weeks of one of the strangest and most challenging years most of us have experienced. We have new ways of meeting and shopping and working. New terms have entered the lexicon: “you’re on mute,” “WFH,” and “zoom-bombing.”
One of the unexpected benefits of WFH is an increase in productivity. Harvard Business Review research found that productivity has increased overall, crediting fewer internal meetings and more time spent interacting with customers or external partners for the increase. The New York Times credits essentially the same elements: fewer meetings and greater ability to focus.
That might be part of it, but I suspect there is more to it. In his book, “Messy, the Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives,” author Tim Harford relates a story about MIT’s famed Building 20. Designed in an afternoon and built in a few days during World War II, Building 20 was intended to be a temporary space for working on aircraft radar (the Rad Lab).
After the war the building was scheduled for demolition, but it ultimately took on a life of its own as a research center until 1998. The list of breakthroughs to come from Building 20 over the years is long and illustrious, from Noam Chomsky’s linguistics to Amar Bose’s speaker technology research to hacker culture.
An MIT professor once remarked of the building, “It is messy, but by God it is procreative.” Another told of needing to run a wire from one room to another, so he got a screwdriver, made a hole, and ran his wire. That would be unthinkable in any other school building. And finding one’s way around was impossible for those unfamiliar: the wings were not in order and the first floor was numbered 0.
That freedom to modify as needed gave the building’s occupants the ability to follow their whims and test their ideas which fed their creativity. Much like the cliché garage start-up, there were few rules and the workspace could be modified to suit the task.
Many people in today’s office environment are subject to clean office policies, ranging from reasonable to draconian. “A clean desk is a sign of an orderly mind,” a supervisor once told me. But orderly minds seldom change the world.
Working from home gave an entire population the ability to operate in an environment over which they had complete control. Conversely, it forced them to find a space in the kitchen, a hallway, or their bedroom. Dealing with kids. dogs, and spouses who are all competing for space, attention, and bandwidth added to the challenge. Those challenges force us to think differently and prime the creativity mechanism.
“It is messy, but by God it is procreative.”
This environmental change and its accompanying challenges make for increased productivity and creativity. It’s more than just using our commute time to login earlier and stay connected longer; we are living in the upside-down and our creative juices are flowing in new directions.
Soon many of those working from the loft space at home will once again be on the road headed back to the cubicle farm. In many ways that will be a relief. But we should be mindful of what we’re giving up: the absence of external control over our workspace and the resulting increases in productivity and creativity.
When Building 20 was finally demolished in 1998, MIT held a farewell celebration, almost a wake, that was well-attended by many of its former occupants. When we head back to the office we owe ourselves time to mourn our lost freedom — and creativity — as well.
