I recently cleared my desk and it feels great. For those of you who don't know my office, let me step back.
There are three types of offices in my opinion. The sterile office, the trashed office, and those in between. I fall in between for sure. I won't suggest what's best, because what's best is what works for you. Permit me a story about retired professor James Lombardi. (Not the current Lombardi, but his dad.) He got a call from security one night saying that Carr Hall had been broken in to. The intruders got into his office and absolutely trashed it. James hurried over that night to inspect the damage to his office, looked at the horrified security guard, and said something like "What? It looks fine to me!"
On the opposite tack, my boss at my job prior to coming to Allegheny told me not to handle a piece of paper more than three times. You should read it, act on it, and then put it in its final home. He also had people working for him that could help him achieve that goal. Not all of us are so lucky. But, thinking about that strategy can help you attack the day's work in a more efficient way.
My old boss was a neat freak, and that worked for him. He had an inbox, what he was working on at that moment, and then a filing cabinet. Jim Lombardi was a disaster, but it worked for him. His office was his filing cabinet, but he didn't spend much time worrying about that and focused on what he was working on at that moment. It's the people like me who fret over the piles of stuff around them and what to do that have the problem. The key is to focus on completing your work, not on what you still have to do.
When I cleared the piles of papers on my desk, a full 50% of them were issues that had fallen to the bottom of the pile for a reason. They just weren't that important. If I had been organized, I would have categorized them as such immediately and filed them, but instead, I needed time itself to set the priority for me, and relying on external influence to keep you organized is a bad strategy. So, after clearing the 50% of files that were outdated, irrelevant, or duplicated, I took what was left, put them into project folders, and I won't look at them again until they are important issues once more. And I expect they will be, or else, I would have trashed them. But, for now I have bigger fish to fry.
Maybe this is common sense to you, but I wanted to share another daily experience that maybe you can apply to your own situation and consider.