Your eyes keep a budget

You sit down to write one email and your eyes go to the mug, the charger, the stack of papers, then back to the screen. Nothing on the desk asked for attention. It got some anyway.

In 2011, Stephanie McMains and Sabine Kastner of Princeton University put 10 people in an fMRI scanner and showed them several objects at once. Their paper in the Journal of Neuroscience opens with the finding that matters for your desk. When several things sit in view together, they compete for space in the visual cortex by suppressing each other. That’s what a system with limited capacity looks like.

Several objects, one patch of visual cortex. They press each other down until attention picks one.

Attention can push back. Focus on one object and its signal rises while the others fall. There’s a cost, though. The less a scene sorts itself into clear groups, the harder attention has to work to settle the competition. A crowded, unstructured field of view is more work to look at before you’ve decided anything about it.

The limits are plain. It was 10 people, abstract shapes on a screen, a lab. Nobody scanned a kitchen. What the work gives you is a mechanism: clutter in view is load on a system with a fixed budget, whatever you feel about your room.

Why the room feels loud

The load shows up as friction in ordinary life: the thing you have to move before you can start the thing you meant to do.

The pile you move before you can start is the cost the survey measured.

A 2016 survey of 1,394 adults in the US and Canada, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, measured clutter with statements like “I feel overwhelmed by the clutter in my home” and asked whether people had to move things before they could get things done at home. Higher clutter scores went with a weaker sense of the home as a place of one’s own, and with lower well-being.

Put the 2 studies together. A full room costs attention to look at, and it costs a step before every task. Neither cost is big on its own, but you pay both many times a day.

There’s a third piece. In the UCLA home-tour study of 60 working spouses, the women who described their homes with words about clutter and unfinished projects had flatter cortisol curves over the days that followed (Saxbe and Repetti, 2010). Clutter wasn’t only something they saw. They carried it around.

A word for the messy desk

Before you clear everything, a confession from the research: the messy desk has a job too.

In 3 experiments at the University of Minnesota, Kathleen Vohs and colleagues had people work in either a tidy room or a messy one (Psychological Science, 2013). Asked to dream up new uses for ping-pong balls, both groups produced about the same number of ideas. Independent judges rated the messy room’s ideas more creative. The tidy room, in turn, nudged people toward the conventional choice: the apple over the candy bar, the classic option over the new one.

Left, where you decide and rest. Right, where you make things. Both can be right.

So split your rooms by job. The desk where you make things can run loose for a while. The places where you decide, rest and start the day do better clear: the entry, the kitchen counter, the bedside.

Lower the count tonight

You don’t need a system. A few defaults that cut the number of things in view will do it, and most take less time than reading about them.

  • One clear surface per room. The counter you cook on, the table you eat at, the desk you work at. Everything else can wait its turn.
  • Keep the floor empty. The floor is the largest surface in view and the one the vacuum needs. Put shoes by the door, bags on a hook and laundry in a basket with a lid.
  • Close the loop on the unfinished. A half-painted shelf or an unopened pile of mail is a task that stays open in your head. Finish it, or box it with a label and a date.
  • Put the storage where the clutter lands. If keys end up on the counter, the counter is where the bowl goes. Fighting the landing spot rarely works. A bowl where things already land is easier to keep up than a rule about where they should go.
  • Reset for 10 minutes before bed. Clear the surfaces you’ll see first in the morning. Tomorrow starts with a lower count.

Treat stuff and grime as 2 separate jobs. Tidying is putting things back where they live, and it takes minutes once the landing spots exist. Cleaning is dusting, vacuuming and wiping, and it goes faster in a room that’s already tidy, because nothing has to be moved first. So tidy, then clean, every time. The email can wait 10 minutes. It was waiting on the mug anyway.