Living in a real mess is quite fun and enjoyable. It is also reassuring at some point; you might feel safe surrounded by your things all around. I actually lived (or tried to live) like that for years since it was pretty pleasurable to have some kind of mystic room which reflect your own personality.

But it had more drawbacks that you might think. And no, I won't be talking about the fact you are always looking for your items; an organized chaos can be pretty efficient as long as it's only for yourself.

The real issue lies in your concentration abilities in such environment.

I personally have some concentration issues; or to be more specific, I'm mostly creative, and being surrounded by items make me think of a lot of various related stuff, and I have real trouble trying to restrain these thoughts.

So about two years ago I started to drop my stuff. And thus, I got rid of a lot of things, living my apartment in emptiness. This wasn't really easy; while I really don't have the love for the items (like some Apple braindead fanboys can have for their ugly pieces of plastic and aluminum for instance), I often have the feeling of making use of them at some point. Giving these items instead of sending them to the trash makes me feel better, so I generally opt for that solution.

With my autistic tendencies, I don't bring back much people in my cavern, so I can actually drop a lot of things and reduce my environment to a desk (to work, play and eat), and a place to sleep. Thus, it looks like this (sorry for the very low quality):

Some people find that kind of place quite depressing. I personally never felt so relieved, and I'm now able to remain focused longer on my stuff. It is also much easier to reach a peaceful and contemplative state of mind.

I still plan to drop even more stuff, like replacing the PC with a laptop, in order to free some more space. Though, I'll keep my monitor and stuff, because I don't want to make compromises on the comfort; this is all about visual pollution, and not much about "having space".

It is also quite comforting to know you can move out of your apartment at any time easily - even if you don't actually plan to. This is a little freedom feeling I don't want to lose.

All of this is kind of related to the way of working in a sane environment (openspace versus closed desks) which won't be treated in this post. A lot of other bloggers obsessed with productivity already expressed their rant about this, I'm sure you can find some more interesting posts about that on r/productivity.