Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Is a cluttered desk a productive desk?

Although this is Spring Break, I've got more responsibilities this week than any other of the semester. Since these two weekends are theatre tour weekends, and I only teach one course this semester otherwise, I've gotten back 6 Monday hours and lost 2 weekends. And there are papers to grade. Always.

In the meantime, I got an extension on the article (half drafted) due on Monday, and am gearing up for the talk in two weeks.

Plus, with the inspection on our current house just in (with several small things to be done) and the one on the new house recently completed (with items to request), and movers to contract, and excess furniture to offload on craigslist, this housing switch couldn't be happening at a better time (!!).

Plus, for Christmas, one gift to Willow was that I'd take over manuscript submissions for lit mags.

So I can't tell, is this a productive desk, or just a messy one?

8 comments:

Lucy said...

That's actually a pretty tidy desk. :) Good luck being productive, too!

undine said...

Horace, it looks productive to me, but then it looks eerily like mine, so I have a vested interest in believing that ;-).

Sisyphus said...

Pshaw, that's hardly messy at all! You need at least a half-a-dozen filth packets before you can say it's untidy.

And I see my little orange guy right there in the middle of that shelf! Helloooo, walkers in the city!

Anonymous said...

By no stretch of the imagination is that desk anywhere even close to messy.

I read a book A Perfect Mess which basically argued, in favor of the messy desk, that we have gone WAY too far with the clean desk policies and professional organizers and it is stifling creativity and wasting time. Needed some editing, though.

Dr. Crazy said...

Dude, you don't know from messy. I'll take some pics of my office desk to show you what messy is, if you don't believe me. And seriously: I don't even have a desk at home: I've got my dining room table, which continues to have a ceramic Christmas tree on it, because I've clearly lost all control. What all of this is to say is that your messy is the tidiest I could ever hope for :)

moria said...

Our poor Horace appears to be the victim of an organized mind, a rare breed of intellectual both creative and comprehensible, both productive and tidy.

It's a terrible affliction, and we must send him our most fervent prayers in his time of need.

(N.B., however, that those who accuse you of tidiness include, according to their pseudonyms : a mythological figure condemned to eternal torment, a psychotic with a terminal degree, and the personification of folly. You, according to yours, are one of the great luminaries of classical letters. Ergo, well...)

Anonymous said...

Totally productive! Look at the notes at the ready, poised for action. Very nice!

Tom said...

I always believe that the messiness of my own desk is an index of the amount of stress I feel: and I wish my desk were as tidy as the one in that picture!