What helped me a lot was: Having radically different systems for different purposes.
Boxes and wardrobes are totally fine for clothes, for example. I know where my clothes are and where I can put clothes that I find lying around.
When I am working on a "project" (which can be anything from programming over electronics to building a tiny trebuchet out of chopsticks), it helps to have a box or similar for just that purpose.
(But only if the visual stimulation of that project overwhelms me. Otherwise, it makes more sense to have it laid out.)
And: You can have different granularities. If you mostly collect e.g. paperwork but once a year require some of it, then putting it into a large "inbox" can make sense, because it is simply not worth the effort to divide it up in subcategories.
In the end, most systems are tradeoffs: Insertion time vs. search time, required space, annoyance-when-using-it (measured in frowns per second), etc.