Different people have different ways to organize. IIRC, Hermann-Miller did a study on that and decided that the central drawer in a desk should be very shallow to prevent (most) people from piling junk up in layers there.
I did an internship in SFO with this guy a couple of decades ago - he was supremely organized (in his mind, spatially) and could find anything instantly. People even tested him to see if he could do it for older projects. When the firm moved to Oakland they brought in a 4x8 sheet of plywood, carefully slid the entire piles of stuff over onto it and shrink wrapped it so everything would stay in place, then slid it back onto the desktop. He is a guy who had an engineering degree and then changed careers.
