The cost of a messy desk

Take a look at your desk right now. Is it messy? I’ve got two empty water bottles, one empty mug, one hard drive, one pair of sunglasses, and some dust on my desk. 

How does a messy workspace make you feel? How does it impact your work? 

In an ideal world, we’d all have custodians who tidy up our workspaces every night so we could show up, free to focus every day. This isn’t an ideal world. We’ve all got deadlines, demanding clients, and passion projects that we’re working on. It’s hard to justify spending time cleaning with these deadlines looming. 

I started wondering the other day: how much does a messy desk cost us?

Let’s run the numbers. 

First, let’s estimate how long it would take to clean off a messy desk. If we’re looking at general clutter (papers, mugs, pens, gear, dust) then it’ll probably take five minutes to clean the desk. 

Second, let’s estimate the impact of working with a messy desk. Does it make you 5% less focused? 10% less? Maybe only 2%? This probably depends on how stressed you get by clutter. For this exercise, let’s say it makes you 5% less focused. Doesn’t seem like a big deal, right? 

Third, let’s discover the impact of a 5% loss of focus over the course of an 8-hour workday. 5% of one hour is 3 minutes, which means a messy desk costs you 24 minutes of focus. If you work 10 hours, it costs you 30 minutes. 

So the five minutes spent cleaning the desk brings you a 480% (almost a 5-to-1) return on investment in retained focus for the day. Not to mention—if you leave your desk messy for a week, you’re losing two hours of focus. 

Let’s try another example—let’s say your entire workspace is really messy. Clothes everywhere, gear everywhere, trash everywhere—it would take you 45 minutes to clean it up, and it makes you 15% less focused. It’s hard to justify spending 45 minutes cleaning up your workspace on a busy day. But 15% of one hour is 9 minutes, which means in an 8-hour workday, the clutter costs you 72 minutes of focus. Spending 45 minutes cleaning brings you a 160% ROI. 

Of course, this is a crude calculation. I’m sure a messy desk’s impact on focus varies wildly from person to person, and is impacted by dozens of other factors. Still, I thought this was an interesting exercise that has implications for other areas. 

For example:

• What’s the impact of skipping lunch? 

• What’s the impact of a lack of sleep?

• What’s the impact of a sink full of dishes? 

• What’s the impact of skipping your quiet time? 

• What’s the impact of dirty laundry? 

• What’s the impact of skipping a workout? 

For better and for worse, I’m the kind of person who is mostly motivated by achieving goals, and growing my business. This capitalistic “grind-set” makes a lot of things (like messy desks and unfolded laundry) seem unimportant and not impactful to my goals. However, these crude calculations make me think otherwise. 

If we run some crude calculations for our own lives, we might discover a direct economic advantage cultivating good habits, and living a balanced lifestyle.