Frequently, I hear professors and college advisors alike telling students that they need to get organized when it comes to keeping up with their school work and various assignments. Due to the ability in college to accumulate a multitude of papers, I notice that many students, including myself, place a variety of objects scattered all around a desk and work around it for a period before deciding to organize the apparent puzzle piece of information construed all over the room.
For most of my academic life, I recall teachers telling me that disorganization of assignments from the same class being scattered apart from each other negatively affect grades and academic performance due to a lack of structure. To oppose this viewpoint, developing knowledge is beginning to scrutinize this view by studying the academic performance of those who maintain a messier mentality and lack of structure when approaching school and life in general.
Revolving around people maintaining a lifestyle of tidiness and organization, studies show that individuals who work in this environment are more likely to execute wholly positive decisions regarding their school work resulting in heightened GPAs, increased probability to complete and turn in assignments on time and a healthy attitude toward one’s academic work. While maintaining an organized lifestyle can lead to these positive qualities, a messy, untidy space can many times yield different, expressive results.
Now, more people are viewing messiness and disorganization with the result to produce an environment inciting increased levels of creativity and critical thinking skills. The creativity one can excerpt is dependent on their capability to go outside the normal boundaries of thought and attempt various levels of action, not commonly reflected as normal, which in turn is heightened by a space defined as cluttered.
Now, I am not saying that once a person trashes their room, they end up with the capacity to acquire creative thoughts. Paradoxically, the mess an individual maintains on their desk is, to an extent, within their control, and is caused by the decision of a person to place the papers in a different, complicated manner only familiar to them. Thus, if a mess is intentionally brought into being, does it really lack structure?
Perhaps, it would seem as if your messy desk is not fully restricting your potential, but enhancing it in other fashions not commonly realized. Conclusively, a variety of studies present the principle that heightened creativity is more susceptible to an individual who maintains a cluttered desk or messy space.
