It starts with a Post-it note scrawled with a reminder. Then a chocolate bar you’ll probably eat later. An extra charging cord or two find their way into the mix, along with a laptop, a folder full of projects, a lanyard from a recent conference and a permission slip sent home from school.

And soon, the pile of things on your desk that are set aside for later becomes a giant, overwhelming stack.

In modern workplaces, untidy desks are far more common than neat, orderly ones.Credit: Getty Images

The chaos of modern life and the ease of accumulating cheap items through online shopping have contributed to an abundance of clutter. That’s true in home offices and traditional workspaces alike. And those jumbles of misplaced belongings can drain our mental resources, distracting us from work and dragging down our productivity.

“Clutter reduces our bandwidth. It negatively affects our perception of our environment or ourselves,” said Marietta Van Den Berg, psychiatrist and medical director for Surrey Memorial Hospital in British Columbia. “It influences whether we make good choices or not. And it even influences our levels of stress and our levels of sleep.”

Researchers at UCLA found that women who were living with a high density of household objects had high levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

“Things circulate into our lives all too easily. We need a competitive plan for things to circulate out,” said Matt Baier, owner of Matt Baier Organising in Stamford, Connecticut. “A good example of that is buying on Amazon. It’s so easy. Boxes come in. We have so many houses that are just piled with boxes, opened and unopened, things that need to be returned, boxes that need throwing out.“

There are many reasons........

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