Now, I must admit I have a very messy desk. I know it used to drive one of my mooting partners absolutely wild (she is one of the neatest people I know). Various bosses have taken me to task about it – one used to come in to conduct a three monthly “clean up”, and another used to shout with despair when he looked into my office, “You’re a MESSER!” My mind is actually quite neat, but my desk is not.
I know exactly where I inherited this tendency from, too. One year, I gave my dear mother a card for Mother’s Day, which featured an illustration by Judy Horacek. It pictured a woman sitting at a desk, looking glumly at giant piles of paper. Another woman was walking past and telling the sitting woman: “Don’t worry, one day the filing fairy will come and clean it all up”. That’s what I’m waiting for! The filing fairy. Except if she files things away, I won’t know where they are any more.
That’s why I was very pleased to read about this book. Among other things, it says that Albert Einstein had a notoriously messy desk, messy people do know where they put stuff and that having a messy desk can be a sign of productivity and intelligence. Hoorah for the messy desk!
(But I will have to do something about the fact that the paper is piled up so high next to me that it looks like it’s about to topple. I have some limits, you know.)
The Legal Soapbox 