A picture may be worth a thousand words, but when a writer is conjuring the image of a scene in the reader's mind, every word must count.
Though descriptions are comprised of all the senses, the one used the most is that of sight.
At any time, there are hundreds if not thousands of images in front of you. Your mind filters those images so you see what you want to see. But look more closely and you might become more aware of the hard, sleek lines of your computer monitor... The color of your desk and those things on top of it... The walls around you, or the scene outside your window...
You may see the fields in the distance or the uneven bark of the tree in front of you... Lush pink blossoms or the bees and hummingbirds attracted to it... Technology, such as phones, eReaders, televisions, radios, printers... Or papers, calendars, pens, eyeglasses...
What a writer describes in each scene must have significance, either to set the stage or to provide information that will be significant in that scene and upcoming ones. If they describe every little thing, the reader becomes overwhelmed with what they should remember versus what may be insignificant.
