Clean Off Your Desk Day

What the day is

Clean Off Your Desk Day is kept on the second Monday of January, so the date moves each year. It lands on the first full working week, when the desk still holds everything abandoned before the holidays.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented. The case for and against a clear desk is more interesting than the instruction.

For clearing it: visual attention is a limited resource that competing objects draw on simultaneously. Work on the neuroscience of attention has shown that multiple items in view compete with one another for processing, so a cluttered field genuinely reduces how well any single thing in it is handled. Clutter is not merely untidy; it is quietly consuming capacity.

Against: a well-known set of experiments found that people working in a tidy room behaved more conventionally and generously, while those in a messy room produced more genuinely novel ideas on a creativity task. Order seems to encourage doing the expected thing, and disorder to loosen it. Neither state is simply better, which suggests choosing by the task rather than by temperament.

The more useful diagnosis is that most desk clutter is not objects at all. It is decisions that were deferred: the letter not answered, the receipt not filed, the thing not thrown away. Tidying by moving piles around leaves every one of those decisions intact, which is why the pile comes back. Clearing properly means making the decisions, which is the part that takes the time.

There is also a plain hygiene argument. Desks, keyboards and the phone you touch constantly carry substantial bacterial loads, and almost nobody cleans them.

How to take part

• Handle each item once and decide: act, file, or bin. Do not restack.
• Clear the digital desktop too, which is the same problem with no dust.
• Wipe the keyboard, mouse and phone while you are there.
• Leave one working surface genuinely empty rather than aiming for total order.
• Keep a mess drawer if disorder helps you think. The research is on your side.