Most closet advice starts with "take everything out." That is why most closets stay the way they are. Taking everything out turns a two-hour job into a two-day job, and if you run out of time you are left worse off than when you started.
Here is the version that survives a real afternoon. Four passes, in this order. You can stop after any one of them and the closet is still better than it was.
Pass one — pull out only what does not belong
Not clothes you have fallen out of love with. Only the things that are not clothes: the cables, the gift bags, the box of photos, the spare duvet. They go somewhere else in the house, or into a lidded bin that lives under the bed.
This pass takes fifteen minutes and buys back more space than any other.
Pass two — group by shape, not by season
Seasonal sorting fails because seasons overlap for about four months of the year. Shape does not change. Long hanging things together, short hanging things together, folded things together, and you immediately see that half your rail is being wasted on shirts hanging over empty air.
That empty air under the short rail is where a second rail, a small dresser, or two stacked bins go.
Pass three — give the awkward things a container
Every closet has four or five categories that have no natural home: belts, scarves, gym kit, the shoes you wear twice a year. These are what actually make a closet look chaotic, because they have no shape of their own.
One open bin each. Label it or do not — the point is that the pile now has an edge.
Pass four — leave one shelf empty
This is the one people skip, and it is the one that decides whether the closet stays sorted. A closet with no slack has nowhere to put the thing you are holding at eleven at night, so the thing goes on the floor, and the floor is how it starts again.
One empty shelf. One empty bin. That is the maintenance budget.