How neat should you keep your desk/home? On one hand, a certain level of cleanliness is required so that you can be organized and find everything. I also feel like if you wake up in a clean bedroom, it sets a good tone for the day. On the other hand, you don't want to be obsessively cleaning all the time because 1) it becomes inefficient after you reach the level of "good enough" and 2) you want to leave things in the such a state that you can rapidly pick up where you left off. It's like a mental bookmark. You leave your book on the page you were reading and the relevant scraps of notes nearby. But you should not leave random piles of paper on your desk that have nothing to do with the project you were last working on. The idea is to always maintain the focus on what you want to do next. This is one of the ideas behind GTD: focus on one task at a time, but keep yourself organized enough that you see the big picture (by filing things properly and doing periodic reviews).
For some additional perspective, you can read Malcolm Gladwell's article "The Social Life of Paper," which I have previously mentioned in this blog.
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