“People ask me about the positive side of clutter and I say, ‘There isn’t any positive side.’”

This is incorrect, of course.

I dislike clutter and I personally maintain a relatively clutter-free existence but of course there is a trade-off to be made between short term expediency and lack of clutter.

Understanding this trade-off has been helpful to me - especially in designing and acquiring living spaces.

Here is an example:

My current office space requires two rooms. However, I went out of my way to find a suite with three rooms - the third of which was not, and continues to not, be necessary. What this "buffer space" allows me to do is stage, or cache, incoming items and/or projects while allowing me to make full (clutter-free) use of the necessary two rooms without interruption.

Running my office without a third room would be like running a CPU without a cache - it is perfectly workable and there's no reason it can't be done - but it requires immediate, real-time interruption of work to maintain the empty (clutter-free) pipeline (really stretching the CPU analogy here, but you get the idea).