The cost of a clean desk

I have never once cleared a desk on a day the writing was going well.

That sentence took about four years to become obvious to me, and I offer it as the whole argument in case you would rather not read the rest.

Tidying passes every test procrastination usually fails

Most procrastination announces itself. You are on a phone, or in a kitchen, or forty minutes into an argument with a stranger about a film neither of you has seen. There is a moment of noticing, and the noticing is usually enough.

Tidying does not have that moment, because every property we use to identify procrastination is absent:

• It is effortful. You are moving, deciding, discarding.
• It is productive. There is a visibly better state afterwards.
• It is related to the work. A clear desk genuinely does help.
• It is finite. It ends, and it ends soon, and then you will start.

Four for four. There is nothing to catch.

What it is actually doing

The thing I eventually noticed is that the impulse is extremely well timed. It does not arrive at nine in the morning. It arrives about ninety seconds after I open the document and discover that the paragraph I left yesterday is worse than I remembered.

That is not a coincidence and it is not about the desk. It is a state change — from I am a person who is about to write to I am a person who is failing to write — and the tidying is a way of not making it. As long as I am moving objects, I have not yet had the bad meeting with the work.

The test

The one thing that has helped is not resisting the impulse, which does not work, but timing it.

If the desk needs clearing, it needed clearing yesterday too. So: clear it, and then notice whether the urge survives the clearing. If it does — if you get to the end and find a shelf that also needs doing — that was never about the desk.

On a genuinely bad day I can now get about four minutes of this before it becomes unmistakable. That is not nothing. Four minutes is much better than the two hours it used to buy.

What I am not claiming

I am not claiming the desk does not matter. It does; I work badly in a mess and I know it.

I am claiming that the decision to deal with it is almost never about the mess, and that treating a scheduling problem as a virtue problem is why it took me four years. The fix was not more discipline. It was moving the tidying to Friday afternoon, when nothing good was going to happen anyway, and thereby removing its cover.