The arm's-reach rule, and the honest high shelf
Every cabinet has a golden strip: the shelf between hip and eye level. Fill it with the things you use without thinking. Below it, heavy things you lift rather than reach for — pans, mixing bowls, the slow cooker. Above it, the seasonal and the occasional: the big roasting tin, the cake stand, the second set of glasses. If you have to fetch a stool, fine, provided you fetch it three times a year.
The deep corner cupboard deserves a decision rather than a strategy. Either put something in there you genuinely only need occasionally, or put smaller items in a deep basket or a lidded box you can pull out like a drawer. Anything that has to be crawled into will simply become a place where objects go to be forgotten.
One thing I have learned from living in a brain that does not reward invisible systems: visibility beats elegance. Clear containers, open baskets and a label written in marker on masking tape will outlast a beautiful scheme you can't see into. If a system requires you to remember where something goes, it will hold for about eleven days.
The pantry, decanted honestly
Decanting dry goods into matching jars is satisfying and also, if done indiscriminately, a nuisance — you lose cooking times, best-before dates and, crucially, the instructions on the back of the packet. Decant the things you use constantly and know by heart: rice, oats, pasta, flour, sugar. Leave the rest in their packaging, standing upright in a basket, so you can read them.
