If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?

It is a sign of a boring arsehole

Maybe it should be that a cluttered desk is a sign of a creative mind. I say this as someone who prefers living with a little bit of clutter.

A cluttered desk is a sign of an engaged mind; a person who things. I disagree that it’s a sign of a clutter mind. In fact, the opposite; it is a person who is involved.

An empty desk is more a sign of an anal retentive person; a control freak. Someone who is rigid and unable to handle change and ambiguity.

If I walk into the office of a person with an utterly organized desk, that’s a red flag. That person is not reasonable.

When I worked in a factory, I classified the maintenance mechanics as one of two categories: make it go and fix it.

In the short term, when faced with a deadline or coming up with a solution to an immediate problem, “make it go” is most desired.
However, in the long term, someone needs to figure out exactly what’s wrong, stop the process, and make repairs/improvements for the long haul.

A cluttered desk is probably the sign of someone that’s good on their feet, with excellent short-term problem solving skills.
An empty desk is probably the sign of someone that sees the big picture and has their eye on future success.

Both skills are invaluable, and in the perfect world compliment each other perfectly.
In the real world, they cause a lot of head-butting.

Clearing the decks before … vacation. (“Action” also works, I suppose.)

I also see a difference between “desk” and “desktop” (as in computer). I tend to have a cluttered desk, but I’m almost anal about my laptop or PC desktop. My wife is just the opposite—her desk is extremely organized, but unless I know exactly where to find something on her laptop, I’ll be twenty minutes finding it.

Personality type has a lot to do with ones organizational skills.
Those that use the judging function prefer order and routine, those whose perceiving function is strongest prefer flexibility and are less concerned with rigid structure and order.
I’m a perceiving type but also very organized but not anal by any stretch of the imagination. It’s all about balance and the bell shaped curve, somewhere between total chaos and military style discipline.

I think it’s probably more critical to examine the clutter on the desk, and in the case of the empty desk, figure out where else the clutter is being hidden. People are just too varied in their wiring for me to figure out much from a cluttered or spotless desk. I will admit that there’s something that makes me uneasy at the sight of a spotlessly neat desk, unless I know for a fact that the site has been just recently policed.

I’ll bite. An empty mind.

I agree that a cluttered desk is a sign of an engaged mind. Most people I know with clean desks are interested only in having a clean desk.

My desk is desperately cluttered, cluttered in layers and strata and cascading heaps, some of which I can date geologically and others of which are entirely out of control. It takes very little to trigger an avalanche.

Do I have a cluttered mind? Why would anyone else need to know that? It’s full and busy, but is that clutter? It seems to work fine for me.

As for a clear, empty desk: in my environment, an empty surface represents an opportunity. In someone else’s, it makes me feel a little bit anxious. I don’t know if I can trust someone who keeps all of his or her surfaces clear. Where’s the stuff? What are they hiding?

Thank you all for your answers.

I’m not sure what it means, either. So I went looking around at other people’s desks and one desk led to another and desks led to workspaces and workspaces led to the two colonies of workspaces at the bottom of the list. All in all, it turned out to be a very pleasant way to spend a rainy afternoon:

Einstein’s desk

Sigmund Freud’s workspace (1) and (2)
Freud’s famous inspirational desk statuary

Jane Austin’s desk

Mark Twain’s desk

George Bernard Shaw’s desk

Arthur Conan Doyle’s desk

Agatha Christie’s desk

Winston Churchill’s desks (1) and (2)

Virginia Woolf’s workspace

Daphne du Marier’s desk

Ernest Hemingway’s desk

Jean-Paul Sartre’s desk

Simone de Beauvoir’s desk

Beauvoir-Sartre workspace

Carson McCuller’s desk

Tennessee William’s desk

Truman Capote’s desk

Harper Lee’s desk

John F. Kennedy’s desk

Silvia Plath’s workspace

Alexander Calder’s desk
Alexander Calder’s studio

Ann Sexton’s desk and workspace

Gypsy Rose Lee’s workspace

Susan Sontag’s desk

Ayn Rand’s desk and workspace

Roald Dahl’s desk
Roald Dahl at work

Ray Bradbury’s desk
Ray Bradbury’s study

Nat Hentoff’s desk

Steve Job’s desk

Mark Zuckerberg’s desk

Steve Wozniak’s desk
What Steve Wozniak carries in his travel backpack

Bateau Lavoir Complex
Front
Rear
View from rear
Typical Bateau studio
Bateau today
Notable residents:
Otto van Rees
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Gargallo
Maxime Maufra
Juan Gris
Max Jacob
Jose De Creeft
Amedeo Modigliani
Pierre Reverdy
André Salmon
Endre Rozsda
Kees van Dongen
Guillaume Apollinaire
Georges Braque
Henri Matisse
Ksenia Milicevic
Jean Cocteau
Gertrude Stein
Auguste Herbin
Tibor Csernus
Catherine Sylvester

La Ruche
Typical cramped room/studio
Exterior, c.a. WWI
Exterior, c.a. 1930’s
Exterior at Night, 1930’s
Front Entry, 2009
Neighborhood
La Ruche in 1950’s
La Ruche in 1960’s
Honoring former residents
At one time or another in the years between WWI through WWII, the following artists, writers, musicians and poets lived and worked at La Ruche: Guillaume Apollinaire, Alexander Archipenko, Joseph Csaky, Gustave Miklos, Alexandre Altmann, Ossip Zadkine, Moise Kisling, Marc Chagall, Max Pechstein, Nina Hamnett, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Pinchus Kremegne, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, Chaim Soutine, Robert Delaunay, Amedeo Modigliani, Constantin Brâncuși, Amshey Nurenberg, Diego Rivera, Marevna, Luigi Guardigli, Michel Sima and others, called the place home or frequented it. Today, works by some of these desperately poor residents and their close friends sell well, even in the millions of dollars.

Creative types that are abstract thinkers are more likely ( again temperament theory ) to be less bothered by lack of organization, because they are easily able to create order out of chaos, in their own minds anyway. Non-linear thinkers have a method to their madness so to speak. If you clean up their chaos they can’t find anything.
Their opposites, the more linear and sensing types that thrive on detail and organization will be highly distressed if something is out of place and they will know if you have moved their pencil sharpener one inch to the left or right. haha
A great way to passively aggressively mess with these people, just ever so slightly move something and they WILL notice. lol

No surprise that sensor/judging types are more prone to OCD issues and that intuitive perceivers are known fondly as being scatterbrained wacky professor types in type theory.

It’s a sign that they delegate the thinking to others.

@Espiritus Corvus Wonderful!

The desk top is RAM and the drawer is ROM. I use lots of RAM. Today I sorted my desk into storage space.

@Espiritus_Corvus Yes, I second @stanleybmanly ‘s wonderful! What a fin glimpse into some of the most brilliant people to ever create,

Thanks. But I screwed up on Beauvoir. Here two of Simone de Beauvier at her desk, (1), (2) and (3)

… and four more:

Pearl S. Buck’s desk

C. S. Lewis’ desk

Flannery O’Connor’s desk

Martha Gellhorn, one of the greatest American war correspondents ever. I couldn’t find her at her desk, exactly, probably because she was always on the move, and always on the line, but here she is as fresh out of Barnard as a young ladies fashion reporter for Collier’s in the Paris office, here she is soon after reporting from the Spanish Civil War, WWII, the Chinese Civil War, Korea and the Vietnam War. After Nam, and as a Grand Dame of journalism. Oh, I finally found a desk shot

You have wondered into a furniture store. :)

Dr. Seuss at his desk