There might be benefits to having a tidy desk but creativity is not one of them.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota found that working at a clean desk may promote healthy eating, generosity, and conventionality, but messy deckers excel at creative thinking and at generating new ideas.

Messy-desk successes include Mark Twain, Frida Kahlo, Thomas Edison, Martin Luther King Jr, Susan Sontag, and Steve Jobs. 

My productivity is directly related to order – order in my surroundings and order in my day.

But that order goes out of the window when I am working on a project.

At the beginning of a project, my surroundings need to be really tidy. But as the project progress, clutter builds up. By the end of the project, everything is out of place. I then spend days bringing order back into my surroundings and my life.

Famously disorganized Albert Einstein said: “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”