Zones beat categories
Traditional advice tells you to keep all baking things together, all tins together, all mugs together. That sounds sensible until you realise you use flour twice a month and a wooden spoon six times a day. Categories serve the shop; zones serve the cook.
Give yourself four or five zones and place items by frequency within each one. A cooking zone near the hob: oils, salt, pepper, the spatulas and spoons you actually use, the two pans you reach for constantly. A prep zone near your main counter: chopping boards, the good knife, mixing bowls, the colander. A drinks zone: kettle, mugs, tea, the coffee things, ideally out of the traffic path so the person making tea does not block the person carrying a casserole. A store zone for tins, pasta, rice. And an occasional zone — the high shelf, the awkward corner cupboard — for the roasting tin, the cake stand, the jar of specialty spice you bought for one recipe.
Once those zones exist, the daily decisions vanish. You are not thinking about where something goes; you are simply returning it to the neighbourhood it belongs to.
The unglamorous fixes that do the heaviest lifting
A few small structural changes outperform any container haul. Store lids vertically, on their edges, in a shallow box or a simple rack, rather than nesting them into a slippery tower. Take pot lids off the pots when you stack, then keep them in one dedicated slot so you stop excavating.
