I just read a blog about the impact of clutter on creativity. According to the writer, clutter generates stress and gets in the way of creativity. Frankly, I’m writing this right now in a very, very messy office. Super messy, in fact. My office is small. I’m a piler, not a filer. And I’ve been so obsessed with finishing my YA novel that I’ve really let it go to seed. For a while, I was taking half an hour before working to organize my office, but I
abandoned that, so now it’s a disaster zone again.

There are piles of books, magazines, catalogues (including ones for my dog, Ryder and a Skymall catalogue with an ad for Gravity sneakers that I’m thinking of ordering). There is a bunch of stuff for a freelance project that I’m working on.. There’s a plastic bin filled to the gills with a mash up of papers that I need to file, but can’t be bothered with.
And since I’m a confirmed scribbler, there are bits of paper everywhere.

Is all this mess stressing me out? To be honest, I’m not really sure. The whole situations gets me a little bummed out when I walk in and first eye the chaos, but once I sit down and get to work, I seem to just screen it out. I will say, that my desk is pretty neat. I have lots of stuff on it, but each thing is in its place — these are little figurines and sayings that inspire me. So in my messy office, my desk functions as an oasis of reasonable neatness. Maybe I need to reconsider all this and go back to my 30-minute clean-up routine until I straighten my office out.

Then again, maybe I’m simply having a messy phase and I should accept it. There’s a book I keep meaning to look into a book called Organization for the Creative Person by Dorothy Lehmkuhl. Apparently it has useful decluttering tips for right-brainers like us. Mmmm… maybe I’ll try to see if I can dig through my office and come up with the newspaper clipping on which I wrote the title of the book. Wow, maybe I am just way to messy. What do you think? Does clutter inhibit creativity?