We associate symmetry with happiness<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Do you like it when things are properly centered and symmetrically arranged? The answer, for most of us, is yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One study shows that we associate symmetry with happiness<\/strong><\/a> more strongly than with disgust<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The opposite also holds true \u2014 we associate asymmetry more strongly with disgust than with happiness<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Participants in this study used words \u2014 in a way \u2014 to show their distaste for any kind of imbalance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Namely, they were first presented with 2 sets of 5 words:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The words appeared one after another, and people had to connect them to either a happy or disgusted face, as quickly as they could. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But here\u2019s the catch \u2014 they couldn\u2019t connect them in whatever way they wanted: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Do you think you would perform differently between these two tasks?<\/p>\n\n\n\n It turns out that you would. Across the board, participants took longer and made more mistakes with the second task.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Apparently, linking asymmetry with happiness or symmetry with disgust just doesn\u2019t make sense to our brains<\/strong>. We have to expend more effort to do it, and even then, we won\u2019t always be successful.<\/p>\n\n\n \n Elevate productivity with CAKE.com<\/p>\n \n Combine time tracking, team communication, and project management to boost your organization\u2019s productivity \u2014 with the CAKE.com Suite.<\/p>\n \n Turns out, looking at organized pictures makes us feel pleasant<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This revelation comes from a study that used a questionnaire and an electroencephalogram \u2014 a test that measures electrical activity in the brain \u2014 to measure how our brains respond to different types of pictures. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The pictures used in the study depicted common items (M&Ms, fruit, flowers, etc.), and each item came in 4 different variants:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unsurprisingly, organized pictures were most highly associated with pleasantness<\/strong>, followed by control pictures (less pleasant), slightly disorganized pictures (even less pleasant), and finally, totally disorganized pictures (least pleasant). <\/p>\n\n\n\n In other words, merely looking at disorganized pictures \u2014 for example, M&M mismatches and total chaos \u2014 causes us to feel unpleasant<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But that\u2019s not all \u2014 the electroencephalogram test also recorded noticeable frontal brain activity in response to totally disorganized pictures. Without getting into the technical details of how and why, it seems that mere exposure to disorganized pictures might trigger an urge to rearrange the clutter, which we then have to suppress. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If this is the case, it\u2019s possible that merely being in a disorganized environment could drain our mental resources, kind of like worrying does. I must note, though, that this last bit was just the researchers\u2019 speculation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Until a different study confirmed it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Apparently, working in a disorganized environment increases anxiety<\/a> \u2014 but it doesn\u2019t affect all people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019ll all make sense once we look at the experiment and its results:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Namely, participants in this study had to perform a difficult task (prepare a speech) in cluttered surroundings. However, the study also included tasks designed to measure the participants\u2019 preference for order because \u2014 let\u2019s face it \u2014 we\u2019re not all equally bothered by clutter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What the researchers found was that people with a strong preference for order felt more anxious when performing tasks in a disorganized environment<\/strong> than they did in an organized environment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, participants who didn\u2019t show a preference for order were unaffected by the clutter around them<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, the more orderly you are, the more anxious working in clutter will make you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Having visual access to key task information increases our performance, but exposure to too much<\/em> visual information \u2014 i.e. display clutter \u2014 instead tanks performance, even when all the information is relevant. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the conclusion of a study looking into the ways display clutter affects how we focus our attention<\/a>. As display clutter increases, performance decreases. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s kind of like how in video games, we have HUDs (head-up displays) that constantly provide insight into important metrics such as your health, mana, cooldowns, and minimap. However, if the HUD is cluttered with stats that aren\u2019t relevant enough to keep in sight at all times \u2014 resistances, quest logs, item durability, etc. \u2014 it just becomes distracting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The same thing happened to the participants in this study (stock brokers), whose accuracy and consistency dropped when they were trading stocks for which they had more visual information cues displayed (price, volatility, traded volume, etc.).<\/p>\n\n\n \n Elevate productivity with CAKE.com<\/p>\n \n Combine time tracking, team communication, and project management to boost your organization\u2019s productivity \u2014 with the CAKE.com Suite.<\/p>\n \n We like it when things make sense. In fact, it would appear that we like it when things make sense so much that even <\/strong>reading about randomness increases our anxiety<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s walk through this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019re a participant in this study, and you\u2019re given 1 of 3 passages to read. The text is mostly the same in all cases \u2014 detailing how philosophers and scientists at a Harvard conference have closed in on the \u201cmeaning of life\u201d and whether or not it\u2019s being guided by some underlying order. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The conclusions, however, are different, and say the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n How would this make you feel? <\/p>\n\n\n\n The first two passages likely wouldn\u2019t trigger any reactions, whereas the third one would make you more anxious. That\u2019s how the people in this study described their feelings. But even if you don\u2019t put much stock in self-reporting, there\u2019s always the good ol\u2019 electroencephalogram, which recorded high error-related negativity (ERN) in people reading the third passage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat\u2019s error-related negativity,\u201d I hear you say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s measurable activity in the brain that happens right after we make an error in a cognitive task. Kind of like how we wince when we experience pain, our brain <\/strong>winces<\/em><\/strong> when we make a mistake<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Fun fact: ERN spikes when we make a mistake even if we aren\u2019t aware of making it, although the spike is significantly smaller in these cases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Disorganization isn\u2019t exactly experimental physics \u2014 something we can only observe through academic literature and lab tests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I know firsthand what it\u2019s like to not be able to find a document I\u2019m looking for among a dozen binders or to get distracted from work by a cluttered work environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the same goes for virtual workspaces. Who has never needed to pull up a specific email they couldn\u2019t find and ended up filtering and searching through their inbox for hours?<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of this is to say that disorganization is something everyone has experienced in their lives, struggled with, and sought to overcome<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the years, we have come up with tons of different ways to combat disorganization. For task and workflow organization, we have come up with organization apps<\/a>, to-do lists<\/a>, and daily planners<\/a>. For physical workspace organization, there are many decluttering techniques like the KonMari method, the Four Boxes method, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The key is to find a solution that fits your needs. For example, my wife uses daily to-do list templates<\/a> to keep track of what she needs to do. For whatever reason (perhaps because I\u2019m less organized than her by nature), this just doesn\u2019t work for me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To stay on top of things and not drown in all the writing, editorial, and publishing tasks, not to mention plenty of messages, I need a simple yet powerful platform that offers transparency and real-time collaboration<\/strong>. Luckily for me, my team uses Plaky<\/a> which covers all these bases and more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Even after returning from vacation or sick leave, I can get a grip on the state of the entire team\u2019s current workload at a glance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I just so happen to prefer how information is presented in Plaky\u2019s default table view, but thanks to its no-nonsense design philosophy, the software also caters to individuals who prefer to organize their tasks in Kanban<\/a> or Gantt views<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Disorganization can increase anxiety and lower productivity. Learn how to organize your work environment and digital workspace to avoid this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":3196,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-workplace-productivity"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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![\"Elevate](\"https:\/\/cake.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/banner-productivity-suite.png\")
\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n\n\nWe associate organization with pleasantness<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Working in a disorganized environment can make us anxious<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Visual clutter affects our focus and performance<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n\n\nRandomness (also) increases our anxiety<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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You will <\/em>have to deal with disorganization \u2014 but there\u2019s a way to make sense of the chaos<\/h2>\n\n\n\n