Well I would, wouldn't I?
Concur that messy desks are not necessarily a bad thing. (On another prickly paw, is this news? I seem to see quite a lot of claims to the creative potential of the apparently messy flit across my skimming vision.)
Filing, as the wise Katharine Whitehorn remarked: Filing is concerned with the past; anything you actually need to see again has to do with the future. .... I suppose we all share this pipe-dream of being able to reach out a hand and find anything at will; what is amazing is that we think that good filing could somehow make it comes true. On the contrary: putting a letter into a filing system is like releasing your ferret in the Hampton Court maze.
(This is from the essay 'Sorting Out', in the 1976 Sunday Best collection.)
I like things that are active (even if not currently being addressed) to be out and visible and in place where I, if no-one else, know where they are (and also have a chance of making their way to the top of the pile or at least eventually surfacing). Filing, as Whitehorn indicated, is the tidying away of stuff that can be marked finished and done with.
As I'm sure I have complained when I did not have available a lockable archive sorting space, you can waste a lot of time having to put stuff away rather than leave it in messy piles, and indeed, forget the train of thought that involving putting this thing in that pile which was in a particular spatial relationship to other pile.
I also think of the tidiness of living spaces ready to receive visitors where the effect is entirely dependent on not opening any of the cupboards or drawers into which things have been higgeldy-piggeldy pushed out of sight.
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