Your desk is your work

In the past few months I've noticed a roaring interest in photographs of people’s desks. It’s always interesting to talk to somebody about how they approach a task or how they come up with an idea but it feels like something is missing. They are not telling you the whole story. Sure, they explain to you what they were thinking and can reconstruct piece by piece their train of thought, but there is something they are not telling you.

They can’t really tell you about that as it isn't something they keep in mind themselves. The missing piece is how their work space looks like. We ignore it for the most part, but this element alone is a way into how our mind produced the idea. It is said that “One’s desk is as one’s mind”, and this ends up being accurate more times than you’d think.

Going back to your college years you can surely remember having to work long hours for an essay deadline or some other assignment. You will have had the following steps:

1. Sit down to a computer.
2. Stare into a blank text editor.
3. Get all your notes and throw them all over the desk.
4. Get those books that are relevant to what you’re working on.
5. Open a billion tabs in your browser.
6. Get that new Daft Punk album playing in the background.
7. Go get coffee.
8. Start annotating your notes, articles, papers, books.
9. Make new notes.
10. Start adding a lot of sticky notes to everything.
11. Write, comment, erase, get a new book, search for that one page that has what you need through the stack of paper laying on your desk.

You’d think that all of this is not that important, but in fact, this is a point where a lot of your good ideas come from. It’s not always a book, or some notes but the way you spread your things around and are building a mental image of what you need to do. You look at some people who are extremely tidy with their documents and keep them in stacks, nicely annotated and having more sticky notes than actual content in all the pages. You also have people who have a mess of their desk with everything laying around (at some point there was also a cat around there somewhere). Both of them organize things differently, and that impacts the work they do and also how things get connected.

So next time you walk to a friend who is working, ask him what he does and try to make a sense of his workplace. You’ll probably be able to steal a good idea or two from him and incorporate it into your workspace. Furthermore, next time you’re tinkering on something at your desk, take a moment to step out of it and try to see the bigger picture. It will allow you to piece things together and get a more coherent idea of what you’re doing.