Culturing Creativity: Does Clutter Affect Creativity?
This week for our culturing creativity episode, we discussed the effect clutter has on creativity: good, bad or neither? We talked about our personal habits, and whether we think these habits make us more or less productive.
Episode Summary
We started the episode by exploring briefly discussing a New York Times article Ashley read in preparation for this week’s show, entitled: “It’s not mess. It’s creativity.” We followed by discussing our own quirks when it comes to clutter. Ashley seemed to lead a slightly more cluttered life than Sarah, but Sarah’s was by no means perfect either. Apparently we’re not the tidiest people.
We both found that the clutter is fine… until it’s not. By that we mean that what’s okay one day might not be okay the next day, depending on other circumstances of how stressed we are. Ashley thought that decluttering did tend to help, however it seems to be only a short term solution and not the root of the problem if she’s struggling to write. Sarah found that while she can deal with the clutter, it does make her feel much happier when she’s in a clean, tidy room with minimal clutter and mess.
We also had a chat about our respective ways of organizing our workspace and our computers, and we followed on from that by extending the segment about organization to how we organize our lives, whether we use diaries or planners and whether we find they help.
As a last point, we talked about some methods we use to ‘declutter’ our minds, i.e. what we do when things get overwhelming, which was particularly relevant to us both at this point, where we have very little time to wind down.
The lack of clutter affects my creativity. I need my clutter! I like having everything within my fingertip’s reach if I need it. Drives my husband bananas, but we have designated clutter zones for me. That seems to be a good compromise.
That’s hilarious! My husband and I are the exact opposite to you and yours. I wouldn’t call myself tidy, but compared to his office mine is basically spotless… it looks like a bomb went off in there 😂