There is a pattern in most houses that nobody names. Clear the kitchen table and within three days the mess has appeared on the hall shelf. Clear the hall shelf and it migrates to the chair in the bedroom. The volume never changes, it just swings between a few known places.
That swing is not untidiness. It is a storage shortfall announcing its location, and it is worth reading rather than fighting.
Mess lands where things are used
People put objects down at the point of use, always, regardless of good intentions. If the place an object is used and the place it is stored are more than a few steps apart, the floor or the nearest surface wins. Every recurring pile in a house marks a gap between those two points.
So the question to ask about a messy surface is not who left that there. It is what gets used within a metre of here, and where does it currently live.
Identify the three surfaces
Nearly every home has two or three. Spend a week noticing which they are and what specifically accumulates on each: post and keys, or charging cables, or school paperwork, or shoes. The contents are remarkably consistent per surface, which is the useful part.
Then give that category a home within reach
A bowl on the hall shelf for keys. A single drawer by the kitchen door for post, emptied weekly. A box at the bottom of the stairs for whatever needs to go up. None of this is clever and all of it works, because it shortens the distance between use and storage to roughly nothing.
What does not work is a better container somewhere else. Moving the keys to a hook in the cupboard is a longer journey than the shelf, so the shelf keeps winning.
Watch out for the surface you cannot fix
Sometimes the accumulation point is a surface that genuinely has no business being storage: the stairs, the worktop you cook on, the middle of the dining table. In that case the answer is a nearby interception point rather than a home on the surface itself, close enough that it wins on convenience without the thing it replaces becoming permanent.
Expect the swing to stop unevenly
Fixing one surface often reveals the next, because the volume was always spread across all of them. That looks like failure and is not. Deal with them one at a time, give each a fortnight to settle, and the total goes down even though for a week it looks as though nothing has improved.
The case where there is no fix
If every category already has a sensible home within reach and the surfaces still fill, the house is holding more than it has room for and no arrangement will absorb it. At that point it is a volume problem rather than a storage problem, and the honest answer is fewer things.