What’s the point of tidying up? It’s just moving stuff from one place to another. But does it offer cognitive and health benefits, and if so why?

Things mentioned in this podcast

• Tidiness guru Marie Kondo
• McMains and Kastner (2011): clutter makes concentration harder
• Sitton (1984): we are more positive about people whose desks are messy
• Report about a study showing correlation between tidiness and health outcomes
• Saxbi and Repetti (2010): correlation between perceived clutter at home and mental health
• Report of a survey showing relationship between tidiness behaviour and sleep

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Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast, produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights, and this week we're discussing tidying up. Nick, you tidy?

I've been through a tidiness journey in my life. I certainly used to be a total and utter mess, I mean, everything would just pop things down. I just put things down, they would pile up, I'd find them eventually. My desk until around about a decade ago was just a huge mound, not a pile, but a mound of papers all stacked on top of each other, all of which might or might not have been important or useful. My email inbox was a just catastrophically vast array of half read emails. And then I think coincident and probably causally related to having children, I've really turned all of that around and I'm now- Well, I wouldn't say I'm not, I mean, it's difficult to say whether or not implementing lots of systems of organisation means you're naturally tidy, or whether it's actually you need those systems because you're not naturally tidy, I don't know. But the point is that I now am pretty good at tidiness, certainly organisationally, getting things in diaries, responding to emails, I'm an inbox zero guy. Just generally, certainly in terms of time, I am much tidier, much better organised. I know exactly where I'm going to be at any time for the And at the same time, we've seen this organisation porn phenomenon, you know, that a lot of people now are getting very into the idea of sort of decluttering. And there's this Marie Kondo, isn't there, with her method of getting people to chuck everything out.

Okay, we'll come back to-

So yeah, so it's a live issue, I think is what we're saying. I'm interested in the whole thing. And it's out there as a thing.

Okay. And I think also one thing we want to discuss is different levels of tidying up and what's acceptable to some and others and what's the right amount. I'm very interested in your inbox, your email inbox organisation. That's either in this or offline, we can talk about that. Peter, what are your thoughts on this stuff? How organised? How tidy are you?

Before I get into that, I think it's interesting the language Nick uses about turning himself around as if he's like a found again. I once was lost, but now I'm found. Yeah. Obviously, to Nick, there's something inherently bad about being untidy and inherently better about being tidy. So yeah, I would say that I'm generally pretty tidy, but I'm helped by the fact that I'm also quite minimalist. So they're not to be confused, they are different. It's possible to not be minimalist, have lots of stuff, but be extremely organised. And in which case you're organised or you're a good cataloguer, or you're just very good at putting stuff away and everything has its place. So they're not the same. So just by virtue of being minimalist, I'm not necessarily tidy.

Sometimes Peter's solitary black cube is skewed to the right by a millimetre. Total catastrophe.

Yeah, so the small amount of things that I own can be in a state of disorder. It's just that the perceived level of chaos is less than perhaps if I had more stuff and it was in a state of disorder. Okay, that makes sense. But like Nick, I try to be very organised with the electronic estate, the digital estate, emails. I feel happy when my inbox is empty. And I feel happy when all of the things I've got to do are in my diary with a suitable alert attached that will let me know when I need, I can no longer, don't need to think about it anymore. I try to outsource all of the unnecessary thinking to systems that help.

So we've done this before, right? The calendar.

No, it's interesting what Peter's saying there. I mean, I don't think I do idolise or think there's anything morally superior about being tidy, particularly. I have to say, actually, I had a life coach a few years ago when I was at the MOD who was really an absolutely brilliant life coach. And she got me to draw a picture of my life as it was and my life as I'd like it to be. And the life as it was was a study that was a big mess, right? Basically, it's how I felt very oppressed at the time by all the things I felt I had to do. And the life as I'd like it to be, it was all sort of tidied up and squared away. But she correctly identified that actually, I liked the first picture. I liked that chaos and mess. It's a symptom of sort of energy. And I'd say instinctively, I'm very suspicious about tidy people. I feel like I'm a kind of, I'm not naturally tidy. I'm tidy by practical necessity, rather than because I think it's a virtue. And I'm actually very suspicious of this whole sort of, you know, decluttering movement. I feel like there's something, it's almost like people are, you know, people are kind of at war with their real selves. You know, they have an idealised self, and it's unhealthy. So anyway, I mean, so yeah, I have looked at some of the evidence. There is, there is evidence.

Okay, let's hear about the data in a second. I just want to talk about me for a moment. Yeah. I'm not tidy. It may surprise you to know this, but I'm not at all tidy. I'm marginally better than I was 20 years ago, or even 30 years ago, when I was a teenager. I'm marginally better, but I'm not that much better. And I think the only thing that was made a difference to me is just, I just get nagged about it all the time, you know, by having to live with someone who cares about this stuff more than I do. This random person being your wife. Yeah. Who's wonderful. Who's not as tidy as she thinks she is, by the way. Anyway, that's a whole other thing. She's not here to stand up for herself. Yeah. And I guess when we're talking about tidiness, we're also getting close to cleanliness as well. I'm not that clean either. But again, I think a lot of this stuff is about how much you care about it. And also, we're getting close to being organised, which we're also talking about with emails and candas. I'm not great at that stuff either. But so, all in all, just a bit of a mess.

What are you good at, Fraser?

Well, it gets done, you see. It's like a sort of whirlwind, where, you know, formless and shapeless, but it's still a driving force. Occasionally, a bit of usefulness pops out of it. Some sort of creative beauty comes out somewhere. I'm terribly charming as well. So I think if we want to drill in, just to drill into the sort of theory and facts a little bit. So I think if you look at what tidiness is about, I think there's two aspects to it. One is tidiness is actually, positively useful. It is helpful sometimes. And then there's the issue of tidiness and its relationship to well-being. So there are two separate aspects of tidiness. In terms of the utility of tidiness, I think it boils down to the fact that human memory is pretty limited, you know, certainly compared to, you know, electronic forms of memory. It's associative. It's very robust and it's very error tolerant, human memory, but it is not very powerful. It's not very good at searching or retaining, you know, lots of detailed information at once. So, you know, literally being able to find things, which it seems to me like when I'm tidying up, that's broadly what I'm doing. I'm trying to return things to where I know next time I need them, I will find them, is actually just useful. And there is evidence, you know, there's evidence that people working in a messy environment, in a clustered environment, found cognitive tasks more difficult. You know, it's literally unrelated tasks. Just merely having them, you know, in a messy environment made it harder for them to concentrate on things. You know, quite apart from the, just there's an obvious a priori reason, you know, it is, I would say this sort of DVDs back in boxes effect. Like my kids don't put DVDs back in boxes. And if you don't take a DVD out of the player and put it straight back in the box, you're in a world of hurt. It is going to take you years to find the bloody thing again. You know, and so that's a good example where it just is the cost of that little bit of tidiness is massively pays for itself in terms of the foregone cost of having to find the bloody thing. So there's that. But then there's the whole issue of wellbeing, which I think is more the Marie Kondo thing, which is there is a lot of evidence that tidiness, there's some evidence that mess is kind of good for creativity, actually, but just focusing more on the kind of lifestyle aspects. There is a lot of evidence that tidiness is associated with better health outcomes, certainly better mental health, but also better physical health outcomes. So there was a study of about a thousand African-Americans in the U.S. and they found that, you know, the messier someone was, the higher their risk of heart disease. I mean, that's that's very, that's very interesting. I mean.

But hold on, aren't we getting to like cause versus correlation here?

Right now. Yeah, sort of. But I suspect what we're looking at is aspects of the same underlying phenomenon, which is something to do with a willingness to affect your environment and to control your environment, which I think is probably the underlying cause of both of those, that someone who is who is likely to say, you know, my house is a mess. I can do something about that and I'll be happier is also going to be the kind of person who goes, my body's a mess. I'm going to do something about that and do some exercise. So I suspect when we are trying to correct tidiness, when we're trying to say, I want to be tidier. What we might be saying is I want actually to be the kind of person who has less fatalism about my environment and more control. And I think that is correlated with better outcomes in life. So, yeah, I'm kind of even though I'm suspicious of tidy people, I have to say that the evidence does push me towards recommending it. How tidy is too tidy? Yeah. Peter?

Well, I get I've been accused of having not enough stuff in my house by Nick, in fact, to get some stuff. But I don't think I'm tidy. Yeah. So do you need to be tidy when you've got one book?

I mean, I think what is a messy bookshelf with one book on it?

I don't know how you quantify it. But there are definitely people I've met who have a lot of things, so lots of lots of sort of tat and trinkets and just photos and all sorts of stuff out a huge amount. And, you know, to the point where they're almost a hoarder, but the house is immaculately clean. So there's not a piece of dust anywhere. So presumably they must spend hours and hours and hours and hours of their life moving things around in order to dust on them and around them. At some point, that's got to become just too much. And you're just spending a huge proportion of your life keeping it at that state. Do you know that some people hoover every day?

Did you know this? Or maybe you do? I certainly do not. We have an absolutely wonderful cleaning lady who comes in once a week. She's absolutely brilliant. She does the entire house. I don't know how in three hours. She's the whole thing.

Some people apparently, you know, at my work recently, and they will start talking about this and they were all hoovering every day. And I hoover like once a month, once every six months. Are they young people? Yeah, they are.

Are they all Instagramming their, you know, beautifully minimal houses at each other? Not far off. Because I think this is where it does become. I mean, there is obviously obsessive compulsive disorder is a real thing. And, you know, it's partly genetic. There's some evidence that it is driven by environmental factors, including, you know, things like the influence of people who are around you and your upbringing and so on. So there is such thing as optimal untidiness, right? So, and I'll give you some economics reasons. I mean, first of all, mainly that tidying up, it has economies of scale. It is easier to tidy five things up at once than it is to tidy one thing up five times, right? So just that in itself should tell you that it is better, probably, nearly all the time to have a bit of mess. Blitzing at the right moment. Yeah. So to have a bit of mess is a symptom of, you know, of energy, of things going on. It's a bit like inflation in the economy. You know, you don't want too much of it.

A bit like entropy in information theory. It's a tendency towards disorder.

Yeah. And I mean, that is obviously always going to happen. I mean, where things are best found is not where they're best used. So there's always going to be movement of objects around. And, you know, you don't always want to sit down and tidy them up the minute you've used them.

But also one thing you mentioned a word earlier on was, I think you said suspicious of people who are overly tidy. I think you're right to be. Because to me, tidiness just means boring. And if someone sort of is just constantly hoovering and dusting and adjusting, making sure it's all fine. I just think, well, there's more interesting things to be doing. I want to say, yeah, I think there's more interesting things to be doing in life.

Well, to just bring it, drag in one of our favourite topics off the Aleph Insights shelf of topics is, it's a part of this suspicion that Nick has might be because he sees it as a sort of a counter indicator in signalling terms. So if he goes around to people's houses and they've obviously made a huge amount of effort to make it tidy for him, are they doing it for him or do they do it for everyone? You don't necessarily know. But if you go into someone's house and it's inherently slightly messy or scruffy, it's like, well, you're more likely to be seeing the real person rather than a kind of idealised image that they're trying to provide. Real tip here.

This is how to be a proper middle class person. Well, you're already halfway there. At least you've got your cleaner who comes in once a week. Yeah, that's true. Is at a dinner party, you're supposed to spill the wine. If you're the host, you're supposed to spill some wine. Oh, are you? To make everyone else feel comfortable? Yeah, because that then it gives everyone else a license to not worry about it, you know. And then not lick it off the table. No, yeah. I mean, I spill wine anyway, so I don't even have to think about it. You know, it's the first thing I do. Even without drinking it. Yeah, exactly. When I'm when I'm necking it from the bottle before pouring it to other people, you know, some of it inevitably dribbles down my shirt.

OK, where do we go from here? We're about just over halfway through tidiness. Well, it's interesting.

There's another topic I'd like to drag off the shelf of interesting topics is legibility. Legibility in the sense that it's often used in architecture and art and business organization. There's often a macro effect of groups of humans who are coordinating, seeking legibility, because legibility sort of means there's a simpler system to understand. If you can boil down a system into its simplified model, the key constituent parts, and there's a simplified representation of that model. It's easier to then manage, to measure, to improve and adapt and to steer it. I think the classic example is the org chart within a business tells you who's the boss, who their subordinates are and who the subordinates to them are and who answers to who. So you can then, it's a simplified picture of who you need to talk to in order to have an effect in a different part of the business. So that's a nice legible model. How does all this tie in? You've lost me a bit. So I think this ties back into tidiness because there's a desire to try to simplify and understand the world. So if you can catalog all your items, put them on the right place, give them a shelf to sit on, you can more easily access them in the future. So it's sort of a driver. So I think it's present not only in the individual and their possessions, but it's a driver for much how we understand the world and try to measure and predict and to manage parts of the world.

But I think the interesting thing about human legibility is it's unnecessary for systems that are artificially managed. So what we would consider naturally tidy is machines don't need that. So if you looked at where things are in an Amazon warehouse, it would look like a total utter mess, right? You might have sponges sitting next to hammers and they might be sitting next to cupboards. And that's entirely driven by what is most efficient to put where in terms of what you're anticipating the demand going to be and where things have to physically go. And it doesn't look anything like what a human would consider to be tidy. And yet it's more efficient. So I think we've got to recognize that. And I think I suspect that tidiness is one of those things that has acquired a kind of halo that actually tidiness is kind of good for humans. But it's good for a reason, right? It's good because it's helpful. And it's good because it's easier, literally easier to manage your life if you're kind of tidy and you tidy up a bit as you go along. But I think we have now, I mean, there is that sense of cleanliness being next to godliness. And I think people who are very tidy, I don't know, one of the reason they're so insufferable and smug is because they think that that is virtuous in itself, quite apart from it being useful. One of the reasons I quite like the fact that these, you know, highly optimized systems are very messy looking. It's because it shows actually that doing things really properly does not involve tidiness. Machines don't need tidiness.

Yeah. So I was just sort of going over my own prejudice. I bet Hitler was super tidy. I bet he was really tidy, you know. And I bet, you know, also I bet someone like Harold Pinter, actually famous for not being very nice.

There is actually some evidence that people who are asked to rate the characteristics, the personality of people based on their desks, there's some evidence that they rate messy desks as belonging to people who are sort of warmer and more effective and that kind of thing. So I think it's something that we all instinctively understand, actually, that an urge to organize is harmful. So I would say that organization is good. But wanting to organize things is bad. Like wanting to organize things for its own sake is bad. And I think I can see, you know, intolerance of disorder does go hand in hand with authoritarianism, which has produced some unpleasant outcomes, you know, in the past. So, yeah.

Okay. I'm just wondering if any of us have any conflict as a result of us, of how tidy or untidy we are. I know that in my own home, I'm... Well, actually, what's interesting in my own home is, yeah, I think there's nature versus nurture going on here as well. Because I've got three kids, two of whom are twins, unfortunately not identical, which would be useful for, you know, for doing experiments. But of those three kids, one is female and has always been pretty tidy. Even as a toddler, she was very tidy. And of the two boys, one is reasonably tidy, pretty much in the middle. He's very good at organizing himself. The third one is a total mess. And there's always some kind of excuse.

Do they somehow cancel out?

It would be nice if they did.

Does Olivia tidy up at the same rate that, you know, your youngest one makes the mess?

Uh, yes, but now they're only responsible for their own rooms. So it's, you know... There's no interaction. Yeah. Oh, that's problematic. Yeah. So, so there you go. If for me, that just screams nature, which in turn means, hey, it's not my fault. I'm like, I am dear wife. You know, when, you know, me and my third kid get put in the same sort of place. Anyway, what about you? I mean...

Yeah, no, it's been a big source of, it's been a big issue in the past. I've kind of invented systems to sort of deal with it. But yeah, I mean, I've lived with people who are substantially tidier than I, let's say, was. And probably still am. And there is a sort of tolerance of mess. This comes down to sort of what the optimal level of tidying is. When it comes to bathrooms, for example, I literally don't notice it. I don't notice mess and dirt until it's way above the level that some people would consider a criminal. You know, but that's, which is great. Which is, sorry, which is really bad if you're living with someone with different, you know, different tolerances to you. Because then you end up with the question of, well, what's fair? Is it fair that, you know, I have to do 50% of the tidying up when I actually, it doesn't bother me? Or is it fair that I do something like one tenth of the tidying up? I think most people would think that was a weird interpretation of fairness. But certainly from an economic point of view, that would be fair. Because, you know, I'm paying, I shouldn't be paying half the cost when I'm not getting half the benefit. So there's, you know, there's that. That has been problematic in the past because not everyone sees it in those cold, clinical, rational, economic ways. And the only really permanent solution is getting a cleaning lady. And, you know, if you can afford one and it's an issue for you domestically, it's one of the best investments you'll make.

But then you get into this whole thing about, oh, getting, having to have stuff tidied up before the cleaning person comes. But anyway, just as a brief aside, I remember once living, sharing a flat with someone. This poor naive lady, girl at the time, I suppose, who made the mistake of saying, I think I said to her, oh, sorry, I can be a bit messy just to sort of flag that, you know. And she said, oh, don't worry, because I love tidying up. And in fact, I love doing washing up. I just find it so therapeutic.

Did you test that to destruction?

I tested it to destruction. Six months down the line, she was like, well, hold on. You know, Peter, any conflict?

Yes, a bit. I have a slightly lower standard for file naming conventions and file structure. Oh, Christ, don't get me started on this. This is a whole podcast in itself. So I totally subscribe to the fact that down to a certain level, it's good to have things well categorized. Within any given kind of project folder, I have not yet stumbled upon any standardized uniform approach for categorizing stuff within a project that makes sense, that we can apply to all projects. So all of my project folders are different. Now, that's it.

They're all called new folder and stuff. No, they're not. Documents.

They are descriptive, but they're not sort of numbered. I don't get this sort of prepending folders with numbers business. I don't understand that at all. Anyway, but I'm also much more comfortable, I think, using the search function to find files than browsing for them. I never browse for stuff. I will always search for it first.

I demand the right to reply, but it is another podcast. I think I can feel file names coming up as a...

OK, well, let's save it. No, I'm not. It's too...

There's too much. We're going to have to go back too far.

Well, it does remind me once when we moved from one house to another and I got into trouble with my wife because of all the different boxes, which, by the way, she said, how many boxes do you think we'll need? I said, I think 10 will do it. Turns out we needed about 40. But yeah, and obviously nicely labeled where they should go. And I would get in trouble because I had a series of boxes that just had stuff on the outside written down.

And I remember when I moved house at university, I did the same thing, labeled everything up with Nick and what was in there. And one of them was magazines. And when we moved house, I discovered that someone had written pornographic on the box, which is great. The movers probably enjoyed that.

Sorry, I can't stop laughing. OK, well, look, I think on that note, we should probably wrap up. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. And until next time, goodbye. Keep clean. Stay tidy.