I've been reading a book titled "The Studio Reader", which is a collection of interviews and essays about various artists and their studios. Although they all have their own unique approach to their work space, the majority use their studios as a place to collect. It's like Michael Smith says in one chapter:

"I feel like a full-time clerk, a manager of my own lost-and-found, where old ideas get mixed in with new projects and creative flashes get mistaken for frantic searches for something I misplaced on my desk in the many piles of paper within arm's reach. I like to think I am deliberately playing bad clerk to my good clerk, providing amusement for some fly on the wall, as I transform into a real life Mr. Magoo, aimlessly groping at phantoms, climbing up and down ladders, and creating havoc with the many stacks of boxes filling my studio. Invention and delusion intertwine in my current creative process, with collating replacing automatism and filing likened to the application of a delicate glaze."

See more about this book here.