Messy desks and the myth of the perfect workspace

We’ve been given no shortage of digital tools that should, in theory, help us work better, with more focus and efficiency, and connect us more easily with our colleagues. Instead, email, instant messaging, remote-meeting apps, work-flow and project-management software and so on can feel like so many buckets with holes in the bottom, maddeningly in

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To make things worse, it turns out that the desktop metaphor underlying so much of our computing was not equipped to handle it either. In response to the increased stimuli, our Desktops simply started generating more clutter. Windows upon windows of tabs and tabs, folders within folders of Untitled(1). Never-ending, nebulous clutter.

Famously, when Gmail came along, Google told us to stop trying to organize (and delete) our email and instead just rely on search to find what we’re looking for. Broadly I’d say that approach has worked well, and in the vast majority of cases, I err on the side of risking losing track of something later instead of spending the time to organize it n

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