(This isn't my workspace.) Noisy Decent Graphics publishes before (see above) and after images of getting their desktop organized. An admirable job.

In my own workspace, I only take this sort of deck-claring organizing work every four or five months, and it usually involves putting sixty or eight books back on the shelves, tossing out seven or eight pounds of printouts that I thought I might need (and never did), and stacking all those external hard drives back up (I have four, all oriented vertically to the right side of my desk, and they tend to tip over when I stack papers up on them).

I save this activity for launching major things—the drafting stages of a new project (after having completely destroyed my office during the massive information-gathering phases that always precedes writing for me), or the start of summer break.

For me at least, this massive organization impulse is a delicate thing. There's some level of mental activity I need to have worked through—slightly more information than I can handle, sustained over several months. And then an impending need to clear my mind and hold as much information in as I can, over an equally long amount of time to actually put some of the ideas down into tangible/visible form. If I do it too frequently, I can't find things—I don't have a formal organizational system, but I remember where things are stacked in visual images I have in my mind. So clearing the decks before a new project tends to simultaneously clear my mind of other things, but also push all those other things—some of which are periodically important—off into the margins. I'm not at the borders of anything major right now, so my desk still looks more or less like the image I posted last month. (Actually, a little more crowded with papers, cables, and books. And I still haven't quite recovered from writing the last book, so my walls are still filled with notes and quotes I drew on them in whiteboard marker when I was starting Datacloud. I think I'll have to crack open a can of paint to clear that out.)