In yet another display of people not knowing how to mind their business, the internet got into a bit of a tizz last week over a few bits of paper on the President’s desk.
The photo of Micheal D Higgins behind his desk having a natter with the other president, Joe Biden, had the public concerned about the “haphazard” home office set up.
“I just want to give it a good tidy,” said some, volunteering their time as a “national service” to straighten up all the overflowing books and reading materials on the Uachtarán na hÉireann’s workspace.
Some said it would make their “teeth itch” and their skin to “break out in hives” if they had to work on the crowded desk.
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He’s the President. He should have a desk full of papers, folders, notes, books and photos of his dogs
But desks should have crap on them. That is literally what they are for. Their intended use is holding all the things you require to be productive so you can flick between them as you need – computers, phones, manila folders, books and a half-melted Curly Wurly, for example.
He’s the President. He should have a desk full of papers, folders, notes, books and photos of his dogs. If he had an empty desk featuring a pen organiser in muted millennial grey, a singular cactus and a print in curly font that says “just a girl boss building her empire” I would be worried.
He is the head of state, not an influencer. If his desk was on a Pinterest board under “organised office inspo” we would probably be facing a constitutional crisis. He wouldn’t be doing his job.
There have been numerous studies around tidy desks and if they equate to productivity, probably by academics who were feeling unproductive and needed to look like they were doing something.
One from 2013 says tidy desks gets workers to behave the way you want but messy ones tend to lead to more creativity.
A 2019 US study examined not so much the output of messy desk owners but their perceptions among colleagues and found the person with the cluttered space was ranked “less conscientious” by their peers. However, the person with the tidy desk was perceived to be more neurotic and less agreeable.
This suggests stark boring desks with no papers and a singular pen lined up next to the keyboard are mostly effective in tricking others in the office that someone is organised and hardworking rather than actually being those things.
This is not new to anyone who has ever had the misfortune of being an adult in the workforce.
The clean desk people always feel it’s necessary to say things like ‘your desk would give me anxiety’ as if the rest of us actually asked
After years of extensive and very non-scientific study in the field, it is apparent to me that some people in the office do actual work and others do everything they can to avoid it.
The second lot, in my experience, tend to engage in what I call “performative organisation”.
These are things like making new folders in the shared drives with new labels, tidying files, colour coding meeting notes, making new office calendars, taking the work of others but being sure they’re the ones who compile it and sent it off to the big bosses so it looks like they were all over it.
These are the people who insist on clean desk policies so that they have something else to write an all-staff email about and print out office signs for, instead of doing anything that might be a) hard, b) lighten the workload of others around them and c) won’t make them look good without putting in effort.
The clean desk people always feel it’s necessary to say things like “your desk would give me anxiety” as if the rest of us actually asked or indeed cared about what they thought.
Some of us took Higgins’ refusal to tidy his desk for Biden as a diplomatic power play, a show of Irish soft power
Busy desks with books hanging over them like Higgins’ or the entire New York Review of Books’ office feel welcoming and comforting like a favourite university professor’s office or an old-school family GP.
Thinking and reading happens in these spaces. These are not places where people are just trying to look busy by faffing about with label makers.
Some of us took Higgins’ refusal to tidy his desk for Biden as a diplomatic power play, a show of Irish soft power.
“He tidies it for no man,” observed Barry Malone, deputy editor-in-chief of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
When the Financial Times interviewed Higgins in 2016, they gave us this insight into the President’s mindset.
“Higgins apologises for the state of his desk, which is covered with scattered speaking notes. “I should have it more orderly but I don’t; it’s the way it is.”
And we wouldn’t have it any other way.