Grit and tidiness: could what we know help us achieve success?

In the current era of rankings, academic success, which is synonymous with academic productivity and often determined by publication rate and/orimpact factor, is frequently used as a ranking metric for employment and promotion within the National Health Service (NHS). Office tidiness of 140 consultants (72% male; average career length 24+-17 years) at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust was graded according to a modified version of the Association of Physical Plant Administrators Custodial Staffing Guidelines for Educational Facilities scoring system. 2 Post hoc analysis revealed that consultants with offices of 'orderly tidiness' (score 1) had published significantly more papers (median 27, IQR 4-81) than those who maintained 'casual inattention' (score 2) or 'moderate dinginess' (score 3) (8 (1-18) and 2 (1-12), respectively; P0.05) ( figure 1 ). The high productivity of tidy individuals may be the result of their ability to generate order from disorder-as illustrated by their resistance to succumb to entropy, or the natural tide of disorder. 4 Future studies might look at whether altering tidiness levels could affect academic productivity, as well as how to tailor an individual's personal working environment to optimise their outputs.