An Irishman's Diary

Eight months on, the clear desk policy at The Irish Timesshows no sign of relenting. Even the newsroom - the front line in the war between paper collectors and the forces of tidiness - remains broadly compliant. Here and there a few small deposits have begun to form, like stalagmites in a cave. But the weekly swoops of the clean police have so far prevented serious build-ups.

Weekends are the danger periods. If you come in early on Monday, it's not unusual to find an avalanche of newspapers, magazines, and colour supplements in the vicinity of the news desk. You half expect to hear the cries for help of a stricken night editor trapped underneath. But the piles are always cleared away in time and, happily, there have been no bodies found yet.

A really useful tip for keeping your office desk clean, in my experience, is to work from home as much as possible. Not everyone can do this, of course. And the downside of the strategy is that your home desk and the office one can become entwined in the sort of relationship that Dorian Gray had with his attic-bound portrait. The public desk retains its pristine, clutter-free status, while - hidden away - the other grows ever more ugly.

Now and again, in a burst of energy and hope, I try to implement the clear desk policy at home. The effort always follows the same pattern. The upper layers of documents are easily disposed of, or filed. But as I penetrate the lower, most dense layers, the work becomes slower and more energy-sapping.

The fatal mistake, always, is to start reading, at which point you remember exactly why you could not bring yourself to scrap that press release or that ancient newspaper cutting. Your will-power weakening, you congratulate yourself on the soft targets already consigned to the bin. Then you settle for just tidying up the remaining, slightly smaller piles, making them even more dense in the process.

Although the desk-clearing lobby now has the upper hand in the corporate world, there is an active resistance movement too. It found expression in a recent US book - A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder - which argued that there is an often unaccounted cost to the pursuit of neatness. The cost includes not just the time spent on filing and clearing but, more importantly, the loss of creativity claimed to result from an excess of organisation.

The typical children's bedroom is the pro-mess movement's model for the creative possibilities of disorder. But there are plenty of adult models too, especially in the scientific community. It was thanks to his untidiness, for example, that Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, after he failed to clean a petri dish and allowed fungal spores to develop on it. Visiting a colleague's germ-free laboratory, Fleming rubbed the point in. "No danger of mould here," he quipped.

Another patron saint of disorder is Leon Heppel, a biomolecular researcher who organised the layers of detritus on his desk by separating them with sheets of brown paper. Rummaging through the pile one day he found letters from two different researchers, noticed a link, put the writers in touch with each other, and inspired a Nobel Prize-winning project.

The pro-mess lobby argues that a cluttered desk is in fact an informal filing system, far more efficient and flexible than any the formal ones. The trick, as with so many things, is moderation. You need to have some idea of where things are to give serendipity a chance and you also need to be selective about the quality of the stuff you allow to accumulate in the first place.

After all - getting back to the subject of children for a moment - most parents will have located fungal spores around the house from time to time. I myself found a large collection in the car recently, attached to what may formerly have been a sandwich. But penicillin has already been discovered, of course, so the only useful thing to emerge from the incident was the need for a clear car policy (now experiencing mixed success).

Messes need to be reasonably organised to be of any benefit. Otherwise they overwhelm you to the point where you need help from a professional de-clutterer, who will charge you handsomely for throwing everything out. The alternative is to keep accumulating stuff. And the cautionary tale here is that of the Collyer Brothers.

Homer and Langley Collyer were New Yorkers, born in the 1880s to a middle-class family in Harlem, when Harlem was still prosperous. Both had creative temperaments. But by middle age they had become reclusive, largely confined to their brownstone townhouse and growing ever more eccentric. They grew paranoid too, booby-trapping the house against actual and potential burglars drawn by rumours of their accumulated riches.

What they had accumulated, in fact, was clutter - vast piles of newspapers, books, and eventually just plain junk, hauled in from the street. When Homer went blind, Langley devised a home-made cure and, in a rare interview, told the New York Times he was hoarding newspapers for his brother to read when he got better. But Homer didn't get better. By 1947, still blind and also crippled with rheumatism, he was completely dependent on his younger sibling.

Then one day, just over 60 years ago, Langley was crawling through a tunnel in the junk when a huge pile of newspapers collapsed, suffocating him. Homer died some days later, just hours before police broke in.

Too late as it was, the search for the brothers uncovered more than 100 tons of junk, ranging from decades-old newspapers to pianos (14 of them), via rusty bicycles, clothes-shop dummies, rolls of fabric, and the chassis of a Ford Model T.

That was an extreme case, of course. Even so, I think I'll have another go at clearing my desk now.